Kevin Thom - Hamilton, Toronto, Ontario Photographer

Today is Canada Day, the day on which we celebrate the beginnings of our great country. Like most Canadians, Laura Hollick and I are proud to be Canadian. We decided to create a photo to celebrate Canada. We worked with the versatile hair and makeup artist Sue Upton, who also happens to be a highly talented body painter.

Like Canada itself, this image is made up of many different parts, and took a long time to come together. We started shooting it in September last year, and I just finished it yesterday! Let me explain…

We weren’t totally happy with the composition after our shoot in September, because the tail was cut off at the bottom of the frame, and everything was too close to the bottom of the frame. Laura was sitting on a stool, which was necessary because of the number of hours required to complete the painting, but that made the bottom of the photo look a bit awkwardly cropped too. There didn’t seem to be any other way to shoot it though. She wouldn’t have been able to stand perfectly still for that period of time. We decided to re-shoot Laura’s bottom half and add a tail to the bird to balance it out.

After I’d assembled all the pieces in Photoshop and smoothed out all the transitions, the final image was complete.

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.