Kevin Thom - Hamilton, Toronto, Ontario Photographer

Laura Hollick and I keep stepping up our video projects. In this latest one, we wanted to communicate the concept of “becoming art.” We used nude bodypainting as the medium. We called on Sue Upton to do the actual bodypainting. Laura started out nude, and then Sue painted her white to match the canvas. Afterwards, Sue painted her and the canvas blue. Finally, we animated the painting of the bird on Laura’s chest. Here are some behind the scenes photos of the process. You’ll see the camera mounted on a boom arm. I used that to film some smooth HD video clips panning over the body, but when it came to the editing phase of the project, it was clear that the smooth video clashed with the stop motion footage, so I abandoned it. We’d also animated a sequence of painting the Soul Art logo on her chest, which then transformed into the bird, but we let that go too, since we really wanted to keep the video short and sweet. It’s amazing what gets left on the editing room floor!

Here’s the final video. This is the first video in which I also produced the music. I dug back over 20 years to my high school days when I used to write electronic music and dusted off those rusty skills to put together an instrumental track to accompany the video. After watching the video, check out the 3 questions to unlock your inner soul artist.

My shoot with Laura Hollick the other evening was a multi-purpose one. We were aiming to get three things out of this evening’s shoot: a video, a “magazine cover” photo and a more artistic photo. Sue Upton did a great job with hair and makeup, transforming Laura into the field fairy.

We shot all of this at “Golden Hour,” which is that magical period just before sunset when everything looks like a fairy tale. Unfortunately, because of cloud cover, golden hour didn’t materialize in quite the striking way it usually does at this time of year. However, it was still a good time to shoot. When it’s a little overcast, the brightness of foreground and sky are close enough at this time of day so you can get some nice sky details in your backgrounds rather than boring white.

The video is a visual poem. It was fun shooting this, because it really challenged me to find new and interesting ways to frame shots and move the camera. This was the first attempt at using our new Blackbird DSLR camera stabilizer. It was a challenging test. The Blackbird has a piece that dangles down beneath the camera. That piece has a crossbar on it. While moving through the field, the crossbar would constantly touch or impact on grasses and other plants, often making the shots waver unpredictably. In the end, because we didn’t need a lot of footage, it wasn’t a problem. However, my arm was so numb after holding this stabilized rig steady for about an hour, I could barely operate the camera for the regular photos! Using this thing regularly is going to make my left bicep humongous.

Admittedly, I’m relatively new at shooting and editing video, but today’s tools make both so easy and intuitive. It wasn’t hard to get a result that we were both happy with.

Feel free to watch this over at Youtube in HD if that is more to your liking.

Here are the cover and the artistic shot that we also took the same day.

To see how Laura used these things, run on over to her blog and have a look.

For years, one of the things I’ve always said is that I don’t shoot weddings. It was kind of a rule I had for myself. I wanted to shoot things that I was passionate and excited about, and for the most part, wedding photography wasn’t always part of that equation. But rules, as they say, are meant to be broken. I knew the time to break the rule had come when Rachel and Blair, a fun-loving couple from Vancouver, asked if I’d join them in at the spectacular Riu Palace Mexico in Playa del Carmen to photograph their wedding.

Here was a chance for me to combine my love of traveling to hot tropical climates with my love of capturing emotion and beauty. I didn’t want to provide typical wedding photography, so I pledged to myself that I would seek out opportunities to do things that were different and fun and would offer Rachel and Blair a variety of unique photos.

The first opportunity came up early. I had brought a waterproof camera bag, so I could shoot at the beach and in the water without worrying about saltwater and sand wrecking the camera. I saddled up my old Canon 5D with a 24mm lens and headed into the water with Rachel, Blair and a bunch of their friends. Here are a couple of photos from that sunny day in the sea.



The beach really was spectacular, with clean blue skies and azure water. I really wanted to see what it would look like early in the morning, which is why I got up at 5:45am the second day there and made the trek down to the shore. I filmed a little video of the sunrise to share. But, my real reason to be there was to scout out the location for what I imagined would be some beautiful photos of the couple. Sure enough, the first golden hour of the day provided perfect light for shooting romantic portraits. A couple of days later, I persuaded Blair and Rachel to join me at the beach for a casual session.



There were other fun events during the week too. Rachel had a bit of a bachelorette party on the beach, where she had to complete some fun and silly tasks like drawing a portrait of a stranger, and then selling it to him. She also had to retrieve drinks from the bar with a seashell tucked between her knees.



Finally, the day of the big ceremony arrived. I thought it would be fun to do a short photo session with the bride and her bridesmaids on the beach while they were all dressed up. The girls were game for it, of course. As we baked in the sun and midday heat during the short walk to the beach, it was fun to see Rachel get plenty of admiring stares and comments from supportive guests. We took a few photos, and then I hustled back to the lobby, where the guys were sequestered, waiting for the big moment. I took a few photos of them, and then went back to meet up with the girls again. There were some tense moments, broken by occasional shenanigans and imitations of the Queen. Eventually, the wedding planner arrived, and led us through the hallways of the hotel to where the ceremony was to begin. On cue, Rachel and her bridesmaids descended the stairs from the lobby. Understandably, Rachel was nervous. But as her dad escorted out into the sun and to the gazebo where Blair was waiting, her joy in the moment was irrepressible.

The ceremony was all in Spanish, led by a smiling Mexican official, and loosely translated by one of the groomsmen. It was done quite quickly, and everyone celebrated with smiles and high fives, as the newly married couple danced down the steps of the gazebo.



Later that evening, at the resort’s steakhouse, the bride and groom hosted a reception. As the gorgeous Caribbean dusk gave way to night, there were laughs, dancing, and the occasional joyful tear.



Finally, the happy couple indulged me with one final photo shoot in the spectacular lobby of the hotel. I had wanted to do this shot since first seeing the rich decor and the magnificent chandelier lit up at night.

It was incredible fun to work with Rachel and Blair. It’s not hard to see that they’re made for each other, and I was honored to be able to capture this important milestone in their lives together. My week with them and their tight-knit family and friends was enough to convince me that I should break my “no weddings” rule more often. If you’d like to talk to me about shooting your destination wedding, please contact me. I’d love to hear from you.

I took a little bike ride down the street on my bike to Gage Park this afternoon. I took my camera with 50mm f/1.4 lens attached. Sometimes it’s fun to just take a simple lens and just play around to see what you can get.

It’s been a while since Laura Hollick and I created a new image for our Live Your Spirit series. We planned for an outdoor image, showing Laura posed like a white tree in a white winter landscape. We drove around through the country until we spotted the perfect location, just outside of a little church in Westover, Ontario. It had what we needed: a place to park nearby, a slight hill covered in snow, and a not-too-distracting background.

We did a few test shots to get an idea of the composition of the final image.

We had to work quickly. Although the thermometer read above zero, the wind was whipping in towards the camera, and quite violently too. I would estimate it was coming in at about 60-70 km/h, making it feel much colder than the true temperature. My light stands kept blowing over, and I had to dig them deep into the snow so that they would stay up. It’s a good thing hair and makeup artist Sue Upton affixed the wig very securely to Laura’s head, otherwise we could have had a real hair disaster that day!

Our plan was to wrap Laura tightly with white fabrics to create the tree costume. I moved as quickly as possible to clamp the fabrics around her using plastic clips. Canvas cones would create the “root” system of the tree. However, because the wind was so strong, the fabric kept blowing loose. We decided that we were going to work with what nature gave us, and I shot a number of frames of Laura dancing with the flapping fabrics. The tree quickly transformed into a winter wind angel. We couldn’t shoot for long, because it was extremely cold, and there was real risk of windburn and frostbite to Laura’s exposed skin.

After reviewing the images in the car, we decided that the canvas cones weren’t “reading” as well as we’d imagined, so we went out again to shoot some more photos of the base of the dress without the cones. I later blended one of these cone-less  bases into the image using Photoshop.

This image is technically a little different from my other ones. Usually, I shoot with lenses wide open so that I get shallow depth of field and can isolate my subject. In this case, because I needed a shutter speed of 1/200 to sync with the strobes, the aperture had to be set to the polar opposite, f/22.0. This was the about one stop underexposed for the natural light, and it gave us a very mysterious looking sky, with the winter sun struggling to gleam through the low clouds. I lit Laura using two Alien Bees B800 strobes at nearly full intensity, powered by the Vagabond II battery pack.

Here’s the final image.