There were more Imaginary Girl portraits I wanted to have as postcards but many of the photos didn’t crop well into the required dimensions, and it would’ve meant quite a bit of reworking to make them fit.

The set of six postcards will be available for sale at my studio next weekend during the Eastside Culture Crawl, and then at Got Craft on Sunday December 4th. I’ll also be listing them in my Etsy shop soon.

I’m not sure what purpose is served by the round cement pool I found in one of the garden plots, but I’m guessing it’s a reflecting pool. I’m really glad I found it because it’s a great location. I shot this scene specifically with photo manipulation in mind. I wanted to create something magical and try a slightly different way of processing the image. Along the way I managed to create something that nicely references Alice in Wonderland, which was something Sam and I had talked about ages ago and I’d forgotten.

The final two shots were taken in a different part of the community garden. There wasn’t much else growing at the time because it’s been too cold, but this forsythia bush was happily putting forth it’s first flowers.

At the moment I don’t have anything specific in mind, but I can hardly wait to do another shoot with someone.

The subject of this portrait is Sam. She recently got married in Vegas and the vintage dress, faux fur shrug, shoes, and crinoline, make up most of the fantastic outfit she wore.

We did this shoot outside on a very cold day and I was really concerned about Sam freezing to death while she posed. Lucky for us the weather was saving the really harsh cold and wind until after we were done, and we just had a long-suffering walk back to my place.

This part of the photo shoot was done against the magnificent pink walls of La Casa Gelato on Venables. We were walking past and I decided to do some “warm up” shots here, because when your model is wearing a pink dress, why not add more pink? The rest of the shoot was at a more subdued location and those photos have a completely different feel. I’ll be sharing them in a separate blog post.

I really found this shoot very invigorating to do. I’d been feeling insecure about my photographic work because I haven’t been doing much of it lately. Now I feel inspired again and hope to continue doing more fun and exciting portraiture in the coming months.

I wanted to shoot a fun portrait of Boris and myself to send out as a digital Christmas card. We finally got around to doing this the other evening but I wasn’t quite happy with the results. The portrait wasn’t creative or fun enough to suit me so I decided to take seven photos from the series and make them into an animated gif. I’ve never done this before but It was really fun figuring out how to put it together in photoshop. It was relatively simple too. And now you can watch Boris and I kiss over and over and over…

The tutorial I used is for Photoshop CS3, if you want to make your own animated gif.

I am showing a selection of ten portraits from the Imaginary Girl series, and am excited to finally have more of this work in print. If you would like to attend the opening on Friday November 5th please RSVP on facebook. I would love to see you there, especially if you happen to be a subject of one of the portraits.

Two Women
–> Opening: November 5th, 6 to 8pm
Dates: November 4th to December 15th, 2010.
Firehall Arts Centre
280 East Cordova Street
Vancouver BC V6A 1L3
Viewing Hours: Wed – Sat, 1 to 5pm

What I came away with from the shoot is so much better than what I’d had in mind. Leah led the way on this one, and most of the shots I love the most are the ones that aren’t posed. She waded around in the water with very little direction from me, and I captured what I could with the camera.

This is the twenty-fourth portrait in the series, and I’m considering moving onto something else after the twenty-fifth. I want to continue working on portraiture in some way, either as a weekly goal or maybe a series featuring men instead of women. I’ve been working on the Imaginary Girl series for a full year now and it’s time to switch things up.

It felt difficult to return to the portraits after a month long break, but I love these shots of Krista and the paper lanterns. They make me happy because they’re so wonderful and colourful.

I decided to experiment with processing the series in different ways and played around with a set of Photoshop actions I found on the internet. I’ve never really used Actions before because they lend themselves more to batch processing and I don’t really do much of that. I still had to do a considerable amount of tweaking.

I added a texture to the final shot I worked on last week. In some ways it suits the photo but I think the texture isn’t subtle enough and distracts from the shot. I may redo this one a bit.

This is the twenty-third portrait in the Imaginary Girl series. My original goal was the create twenty-five of them but I may keep going past that number.

I shot this portrait of Stephanie at the beginning of June and as of the beginning of July it will be in a group show at Gallery Gachet along with the portrait I took of Jess. (How’s that for putting new work to work.) This was taken on Granville Island with the giant leaves of a Gunera plant as the backdrop, and Alice in Wonderland as the inspiration.

June has not been a productive month for working on the portrait series because I’ve had other projects I’ve needed to concentrate on. There are numerous artists calls with summer deadlines coming up and it’ll mean more shows in the future if my work gets accepted. (Fingers crossed!)

I have used balloons once before in a photo shoot, with Siobhan in the studio back in November. I decided I wanted to use balloons again as a prop, this time with Eagranie as the model and with balloons of a different colour. Oh how I do love red!

From this shoot I learned that photographing balloons outside when it’s windy is like trying to photograph an uncooperative monkey that can’t stay still. Other than the tricky breezes, the weather was perfect with a lovely blue sky and fluffy clouds as a backdrop. I count these portraits among my favorites of the whole series (so far).

These are a few of the shots I took of Lauren a few weeks ago, when she came over for a portrait session in the old apartment. We had a lot of fun using the pocket doors as a backdrop and Lauren was terrific in front of the camera.

I first met Kirsten Chursinoff at Northern Voice a few years ago, when she came up to chat with me between sessions. She recognized me from Flickr and as we talked I realized I’d seen her textile work a few years before at The Secret Garden Tea Company.

This portrait session was very much inspired by the colourful fibre art Kirsten creates with fabrics and threads. She provided all of the objects I worked with and she brought over a large variety of things to choose from. She was also very patient as I placed layer upon layer of thread over her arms and upper body. I wanted these photos to be similar to the portrait of my sister. I was interested in exploring the theme of fibre arts further and feel there are many interesting ways to use thread as a prop.

The final shot is a composite pulled together from two photos. I created the set using spools of thread and a cute pincushion Kirsten brought over, and then had her pose separately holding the giant scissors made by Peter Kiss. It all came together nicely in photoshop – after a few hours of hard work that is.

Sometimes I don’t have a clear idea of how I want to photograph the person I’ve asked to pose for one of my portraits. This was the case with Kristi, though I did know I wanted to use a natural setting.

My original idea was to use her garden as the setting, but it was too early in the year for the garden to have much growth. I decided to improvise and scouted around for a location near her home just before the shoot. The ivy was located at the front of her house and proved to be the perfect setting for the portrait. The vines were thick enough to crawl into and I disentangled a few and layered them over her body.

I like the smaller series of nature portraits that is slowly taking shape within the larger body of work.

Nature is a way for me to recharge, clear my head, and become centred, but the influence of good people around me can do this too.

This is my friend Nicole Dextras, a skilled and talented artist in her own right. I consider her one of my mentors and I really wanted to include her in my portrait series. Like most photographers, she’s not a fan of having her picture taken so I’m really glad she agreed to sit for me.

It was Nicole’s suggestion to pose with the Camellia bush in her yard and the late morning light I found myself working with at the time was perfect. We started out with Nicole posed in front of the bush but I didn’t want the flowers to just be a backdrop, so we tucked her into the leaves. The portrait was so much stronger once she became part of the bush and she looks very at home in there.

The title is a play on a quote by Kahlil Gibran – “There is a space between man’s imagination and man’s attainment that may only be traversed by his longing”.

I really should do a better job of blogging the portraits I’ve been shooting because when I write about them weeks later I’m never sure what to say. I’m so much better about this with the altered books.

This particular portrait session was very exciting because it presented the opportunity to work with Petrina as a model, and with Shai as a hair stylist. I’ve never worked with a stylist on a shoot before and Shai did a wonderful job styling Petrina’s hair and wrangling the butterflies.

I’ve wanted to do a portrait with butterflies for awhile, and since there was no way I could get real ones I settled for brightly painted fake butterflies. Dressew was my source for butterfly fakery. They have a have a whole section of them in the basement along one of the back corners, which was a pleasant surprise for me to discover.

This portrait features the lovely Casey. She came over to my home studio a few weeks back and did a great job of pretending there was a cherry tree in her hand. As I’ve mentioned before, the shoots I do often require lots of pretending on the part of the model, which can be hilarious. It definitely was in this case. At least it keeps things fun.

As I was working on the post-processing for this I started wishing there was something more in her hand for the tree to rest in. I briefly considered having Boris pose with a pile of dirt in his hand so I could add it into this shot (sans his hands). I decided I didn’t want to go that far with adding elements in photoshop, as it ends up being a ridiculous amount of work and the shot doesn’t REALLY need it. I’m sure Boris was relieved….

I really wanted to do a portrait full of eye-blasting colour because so many of the portraits in this series were shot against our plain white wall. This one features Sonia Ryan, the Coordinator of “Things” at Bootup Labs. Sonia was very keen to do a photo shoot with me. She came over with beautiful sari fabric to wear which (luckily) was nicely complimented by the rich red of the background. Neither of us knew how to properly put on a sari so we did a lot of careful draping with the fabric and I secured it at the back with clamps.

About the title…when trying to figure out a title I google words related to the photo and see where that takes me. This is how I often end up with wordy titles, but it works.

I love my portrait series, but oh does it ever take a lot of energy to come up with ideas and then wrangle people to do the shoots. I’ve been wavering on continuing with this project at all, but then I keep producing work I really like because of it.

This portrait features the lovely Shelly Roche. She came over to pose and did an admirable job of holding onto the strings I’d pinned to the wall and pretending there were birds attached to the other end. Originally I had planned to use Yuuki as the flying bird subject but I nixed that idea knowing how tricky he is to photograph when still, nevermind trying to photograph him while flying. I settled on the pigeon population of Granville Island for my birds and pulled this together from about five different shots. The results of hours of hard work are pretty magical.

I was very excited when Opus Framing and Art recently announced their new digital canvas printing service. I’d been considering canvas printing for some of my recent photographic work so their timing couldn’t have been better. I selected two files from the portrait series and took them in to Opus to test out their print services. As you can see by the photos they did a fantastic job.

The colours and level of detail in the prints are really fantastic and the texture of the canvas plays nicely with the illustrative qualities of my work. Opus stretches the canvas in-house with a choice between 3/4″ or 1-1/2″ stretcher bars and four different styles of folding the corners. I went with the larger stretchers because it makes the finished print more substantial and I can hang it without a frame. I am really thrilled with these two prints and it’s only a matter of time before I have the rest of my portrait series printed on canvas as well.

I can’t say enough good things about the staff at the downtown location of Opus (which is the only location to offer this service) who are very knowledgeable and helpful. They were really great about answering my questions, and I was shown samples of digital files of varying quality printed on the canvas to give me an idea of how things would look. They also have their monitors calibrated to the printer for perfect colour accuracy. It took a week for my files to be printed and stretched, and they gave me a call when everything was ready. It’s a great service with even better results – especially when you start with high quality files.

As a side note, I had been planning to use Kickstarter to create a campaign to fund the cost of producing the canvas prints of my portrait series. I want to put together a show of this work but not beggar myself in the process. This morning as I started looking into it I discovered I need a US bank account and address because Kickstarter uses Amazon Payments Business accounts to receive funds and this is part of their policy. Now I’ll either have to figure out a way to make it work for me or come up with some other means to raise money to fund my art. Any suggestions?

I’ve fallen a bit off track with my portrait series the last few weeks because I’ve been very focused on other things. It’s also been tricky scheduling people during the Olympic craziness. This portrait features Andrea and was taken towards the end of January.

I bought three large pieces of transparent fabrics from Dressew in different colours to use as props for this shoot (and beyond). It was fun to figure out different ways to use them in the portrait, and I especially loved getting Andrea to move the fabric to create swirling bits of colour around herself. It was a hilarious part of the shoot, but the results are beautiful.

For Valentine’s Day I invited some of my friends over to pose for a Valentine-themed photo shoot. The idea was inspired by the work of Katie Sokoler and her “kiss in your pocket” flip book.

I cut hearts from red and pink paper to create a background, and picked up sparkly hearts and red tulips for props.

I asked people to ham it up for the photos. Valentine’s Day is afterall one of the cheesiest holidays ever, and standing in front of a wall of hearts calls for anything but serious expressions.

The portraits all turned out awesome and everyone looks very cute and funny. I love it when an idea comes together so well. A full set of my Valentine’s portraits can be found on flickr.

I think I’ve mentioned before that with the portrait series I’m trying to explore ideas I originally shot as self portraits. I’ve always wanted to redo the Mad Hatter shot of myself from two years ago because it’s a great idea and I felt I could do it better – and incorporate even more hats. And now…voilà!

Shai of Pome Studio is the model in the updated Mad Hatter portrait. I chose her because she’s not comfortable having her photo taken (typical for most photographers) and my thought was I could hide her under the many hats. It turned out to be the perfect concept for Shai because she’s a hair stylist by profession, and she knits lovely hats for sale at Pome (five of which were used in the portrait at the top of this post). In the final concept shot I used sixteen or seventeen hats, most of which were borrowed from friends. The hat pile was far too precarious to balance on it’s own so I had to call in Boris as the hat wrangler to prop things up from the side with a broomstick and remove it from the shot in post processing.

I love how this portrait of Julie came out in a wonderfully magical way that didn’t occur to me when I took the photo. As I was processing the shot I started imagining stars in the background and the blue backdrop became a midnight blue sky. Boris came up with the title after finding the lyrics from a song by Melissa Ferrick.

It’s been a month since I shot this portrait for the series. I decided I would only do one in December because it seemed like it would just be too crazy a time to try to scheduling people shortly before Christmas. But a whole month break from this project feels too long. In the meantime, even though I haven’t been shooting I’ve been working on ideas and figuring out who to photograph next. I can’t wait to get started again.

When I came up with the idea to do a portrait with goldfish swimming around my friend Kay, I realized the only way I could pull it off was to get real fish. I needed to be able to photograph them under the same lighting conditions I would be shooting Kay in order to make the fish shots and person shot match. So I went out and bought a pair of goldfish with the long term plan they’d be a permanent fixture in my home. Luckily Boris was okay with the acquisition of more pets and took it upon himself to name the orange fish “Buri“, while I named the speckled brown fish “Astrid“. (Not that either of them get called anything other than fish or fishes most of the time…)

The above image is the result of many hours of work in photoshop, cutting out multiple shots of individual fish to bring together and playing around with colour. I asked Kay during the shoot to pretend the fish were swimming around her and this was one of the expressions she came up with. It was very cute and perfectly suited to holding her breath under an imaginary sea.

This shot of Kay with the goldfish and bowl was early on in the shoot as we were just getting warmed up. It’s cute but I definitely don’t love it as much as the top shot.

When Kay came over to be photographed for the series a few weeks ago she brought a selection of Betsey Johnson dresses and crinolines with her to wear. They were all pretty specular but I loved this one the best because of the bright mix of colours. I usually ask my portrait subjects to bring a few different items to choose from and wear during the shoot. Part of the fun of inviting women friends over for these photo shoots has been getting to see their clothes.

The funny thing about the shoot with Kay, that I didn’t really think about beforehand, was that it didn’t really matter what she was wearing. I was shooting with a specific idea in mind and her clothing was mostly hidden from view. Towards the end of the shoot I decided the fantastic outfit just couldn’t go to waste and did these shots with Kay seated on the floor to showcase the dress. I love how this gave me the opportunity to try a different perspective from my usual style of portraiture.