Kevin Thom - Hamilton, Toronto, Ontario Photographer

I did a shoot a couple of weeks ago for my good friend Lissa Hill, who is launching her brand new line of motorcycle leathers. Lissa makes beautiful custom motorcycle and fashion leather garments, and it was great fun to find different ways to showcase them. Lissa’s made a few leather jackets for me, and I can vouch for how great it feels to have something custom made for you that fits your sense of style and your body like a glove.

We hired Sarah to model the clothes, and she did a great job. Sarah was a pleasure to work with. She’s an expressive model who is able to quickly find a pose and expression to match what needs to be communicated in the photos. Hair and makeup artist Sue Upton created a number of different looks for Sarah, so the photos would have some variety.

Sue Upton and Lissa Hill getting Sarah ready for the first photo of the day.

I went with high contrast lighting to emphasize the high contrast look of Lissa’s designs. I set up a single Alien Bees B800 strobe above Sarah on a boom, with only the standard silver reflector and nothing to diffuse it. I positioned Sarah close to the white background so she’d cast some interesting shadows.

Tonight we’re observing Earth Hour, which means we turn off our lights for an hour in consideration of the environment. Of course, it’s a symbolic gesture. After we turn the lights back on, most of us resume our normal lives. But, in terms of raising the consciousness of environmental issues, I don’t see how it can do anything but good. I decided to do a couple of conceptual photos to celebrate the occasion. In the process, I sacrificed some cooking wine, soy sauce, corn starch and a light bulb I bought a few months ago, incorrectly thinking it would fit in my fridge.

After taking a few photos with the bulb intact, I put it in a plastic bag and smashed it. Then I dumped the pieces onto a glass plate and drenched it in “blood.” I shot a few frames, but discovered that the corn starch was drying in a very un-bloody way on the big shard of glass closest to the bulb’s base. I carefully extracted that piece with needle-nosed pliers, washed it, then put it back into the composition.I believe in getting photos as good as they can be in camera so they don’t have to be Photoshopped to death, so to speak.

I shot these photos with a Sigma EX 105mm f2.8 macro lens. I staged it inside a light tent I borrowed from a friend. It was lit from below and from both sides by Alien Bees B800 strobes.

I had a very messy photo shoot with local model Agatka the other day. She came to me with a dress that said “Ice Cream” on the front of it and asked if I’d like to develop a concept for it. I’ve been toying with the idea of interpreting song titles in photos, so I thought maybe I could shoe-horn this dress into that concept. The first song that came to mind was “I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream.” I know it’s not much of a song, but you have to work with what you have! I wanted her to be punked up and aggressive, holding on to the ice cream as it melted. I decided against putting the ice cream in a cone because I didn’t think this type of character would care to use one.

Anyway, the shoot was fun. I got the wind machine out to blow that wild purple wig around. Ice cream was melting all over, and drops of it were blowing everywhere in the wind. Even a couple of days later, I’m still finding drops of melted ice cream plastered in various places around the studio. I kept the lighting very simple. It’s just a single Alien Bees B800 strobe with a silver umbrella for high contrast light that really makes the colors sparkle. I pumped the flash up to high power, and stopped the lens down to around f/11 to get lots of depth of field so you could see what was in Agatka’s outstretched hand, while also keeping her eyes in sharp focus.

I presented the final images in a triptych because I didn’t want to lose the sense of motion in the shoot.

Laura and I are continuing to shoot our series of photos depicting scenes from her inner world, like the ones we exhibited at the Birth Your Dreams exhibition in August. We work well as a team. She comes up with these brilliant and beautiful concepts and I refine those concepts to their visual essence. By the time we take the photo, the vision is clear and more powerful than anything we could have come up with on our own.

This time, we shot Laura as a red tree growing in a forest. The concept illustrates Laura’s mission of growing spirit on Earth. There was some setup involved. First, we had to find the perfect stand of trees. Laura had located a spot out in the country where there was forest on both sides of the street. Then, we had to wait for the weather. The vision was to have fresh snow on the ground. When the day finally came, we packed up the car and headed out to that little forest. We drove along this stretch of road slowly a few times, scanning the woods for the right spot for the photo. I wanted to find a spot with mostly vertical trees, with few fallen trunks and distracting diagonal branches. I also wanted the right sized clearing for Laura to stand in, as I wanted her to appear to be part of the continuous forest, rather than feeling like she was wedged in, or was surrounded by too much space. Finally we spotted the right place. Here’s what it looked like from the road.

Next, we had to unpack all our stuff, including camera, tripod, lenses, costume, chair, mirror, props, etc. We had to tread carefully, approaching the scene from the side and back so as not to disturb the beautiful fresh snowy landscape in the foreground. We set Laura up on a chair to give her the extra height required by her tree costume. I tested the composition and exposure while she was still wearing her winter clothes, because we wouldn’t have much time to shoot with her in the costume before she turned into an icicle. It was cold!

When we got the composition we wanted, I locked the camera down on the tripod, and we got Laura into her costume. The long skirt and red top were held together by fabric ties and plastic clamps. It’s not exactly comfortable or easy to wear! In fact, after we got her all strapped in, Laura was pretty much immobile.

I worked pretty quickly to get the exposures I needed. I took three bracketed exposures of each shot: regular, 1.5 stops above, and 1.5 stops below. I used continuous drive and a shutter release cable so that as little as possible would move in between the exposures. In contrasty scenes like this, I think it’s a good idea to bracket because it will allow you to merge the details from the various exposures to end up with something with wider dynamic range. It’s not exactly HDR photography, but more like the techniques that film photographers like Karsh used to use when sandwiching bracketed negatives to create richly tonal scenes under difficult lighting conditions.

I also shot at f2.8 and at f9.0. Normally, I love shooting f2.8 because I like to isolate my subject. But, in this case, the forest was as much the subject as the trees, and I had a feeling I’d want to make use of the extra depth provided by the smaller aperture.

Shooting done, we got Laura out of that costume and bundled up again in her winter jacket. I’m sure that was quite a relief. When I got the images back to the studio and into the computer, I was glad that I’d shot all those bracketed exposures as well as the f9.0 shots. There was very little work to be done on the photo to make it “perfect.” I emphasized the brightness and misty atmosphere of the forest by using a low-contrast process of the over-exposed bracketed shot. This also gave Laura’s skin a lovely translucent quality. I brought detail into the costume by masking in the regular exposure. I didn’t need the under-exposed version. I cloned out some of the excess branches and debris to keep everything as vertical as possible. Light sharpening brought out the detail in the bark of the trees.

The photo looks amazing at high resolution. I can’t wait to present it in an exhibition in some huge format.

A few months ago, Laura Hollick and I worked with talented makeup artist and painter Sue Upton to create a photo of Laura taking off with her red bird spirit. In the shoot, we merged Sue’s painting and body-painting skills with Laura’s vision and my photography. It’s always fun to collaborate closely with a team of people who each contribute their own unique skills. I end up learning a lot about what is possible, even when it comes to my own medium of photography.

The process began with some preliminary snapshots to experiment with the poses and the positioning of the painting. Sue then sketched a few different bird designs onto these printouts to get a rough idea of how it was going to look. We wanted to add a branch so that there would be some context to the pose, and so it wouldn’t look like Laura was just floating there in mid-air, but rather stepping off into the unknown with the red bird as her guide. In the sketches below, you can see that Sue used white correction fluid to highlight the best image so that it could be most easily projected onto the backdrop for tracing and then painting.

Painting Laura and the backdrop took hours of meticulous work. The shoot was spread out over two days because we actually shot two completely different poses. Each of the poses required different background and body painting. It was a test of patience and stamina for everyone involved.

The actual photography was quite simple. I wanted good depth of field and even, soft lighting with few shadows. Two Alien Bees B800 flash units set close to their maximum power, modified with brolly boxes provided this bright and diffuse light. I also wanted to stand fairly far back and shoot with as long a focal length as was possible. Laura’s big studio gave me lots of room to do this. All of these techniques were designed to flatten the image so that it would blend Laura with her surroundings as seamlessly as possible.

Here are the final images. What do you think?

Please also read Laura’s fascinating blog post about this shoot.