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.

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

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.

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

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.

We brought in hair and makeup artist Tim Wilkins to help prepare Laura for the shoot. He did a great job creating a subtle, shimmering and almost elfish look to integrate her silver wig and silver leaf dress.

Once Tim was done with the hair and makeup, Laura and I hopped in cab and headed midtown and into the madness. Anyone who’s been there knows that it’s a total zoo at all hours of day and night. We quickly scouted the area and staked out some sidewalk for our shoot.

I wanted to show the very famous billboards and neon in the background, but allow a close crop that would put the focus on Laura. Shooting from a low angle allowed this to happen. I chose a low shutter speed (1/30) to slightly blur the action around her, and a wide angle lens (24mm) to create some slightly supernatural drama. The wide aperture of f/2.8 created the shallow-ish depth of field effect to separate her from the background as much as possible, but because the lens is wide, the background is still distinguishable. As you might know, the wider your lens, the harder it is to get really shallow depth of field. That was fine though, since I wanted to keep Times Square recognizable as our setting.

The general lighting of the scene was amply provided by the bright billboards all around, and I set them to be slightly over-exposed. I didn’t want the contents of the signs to be too distracting. Over-exposing them slightly allowed them to appear mostly white, with some minor details in them that weren’t terribly distinguishable. All of this meant that Laura was in silhouette, so I added a fill light to make her pop. I set up my trusty little Vivitar 283 flash up high on a light stand and put a diffusing lens in front of it to soften it a bit. With such bright backlighting and no modeling light to preview the foreground, it was like shooting in the dark. I could only see her dark form against the bright background in the viewfinder. I trusted my camera’s autofocus to keep Laura in focus, and just posed her based on her silhouetted shape.

We shot for about half an hour. I didn’t think that our little photo shoot would create even the tiniest stir amidst all of the madness of Times Square, but I was wrong. We amassed a pretty-good sized audience, who mostly stood behind me. Often, people wanted to pose with photos with Laura and ask us questions.

It was a little distracting, but also fun to think that we added something to the experience of a few New York City visitors. When we finished shooting, I was surprised by a loud round of applause that broke out behind us! It was quite a night. Here’s the final image we selected from the shoot.

Here’s another image I shot after I was sure we’d gotten what we’d intended to shoot. I experimented by putting on a super-wide lens (12mm) and moved the camera during the long exposure. I still used the flash to sort of freeze a portion of the action. I like the vibrant, semi-abstract feel of this one.

We also shot some video to promote Laura’s Soul Art® Certification program.

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

If you’re interested, read more about the Soul Art® Certification program.

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.

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

It was Laura’s idea to create this film, to show feathers of multiple colors migrating to eventually return home as part of her rainbow feather dress. We didn’t know exactly where the feathers were going to start their journey, or how they were going to get where they were going, or what it was all going to look like, but that’s really the fun of creating something like this. The possibilities are almost endless. We hiked up to The Peak, which has a spectacular view overlooking the Dundas Valley, and talked for hours about how it might be done. We didn’t really come to any conclusions though. When we got up to leave, I saw a very interesting outcropping of rock on the edge of a cliff, just to the side of The Peak. It was entirely surrounded by lush, green vegetation. “Can you get over there?” I asked Laura.

“Yes,” she said.

“We need to put the rainbow bird on the edge of that cliff.”

“YES!”

Finally, we knew where the feathers were going to go. They were going to make a journey from their artistic origins, through the city, and into the forest, finally ending up at home as part of the rainbow bird, perched on the edge of this spectacular cliff. We were pumped.

It would have been quite possible to create enough scenes to make a feature-length film about our feather friends. We had so many ideas about where they could come from and where they could go.  We only had a few days to create this film, and I knew it was going to take a lot of time to do, so our first step in organizing all of these ideas was to create some simple sketches and select only our favorites to shoot. Here are a couple of Laura’s sketches. You might recognize the genesis of the Red Feather in these outlines, as well as a list of our “characters.”

The next step was to find the actual locations for shooting. We looked near and far, and drove around the city, finding possible spots to shoot. I snapped some quick frames to get an idea for composition so that we could create a storyboard that made visual sense. Here are the snapshots we used to compose the Red Feather scene.

With some of the initial planning done, we were ready to start shooting the next day. We didn’t stop for the next four days. I was shooting constantly, and when I wasn’t shooting, I was processing the photos and assembling them into stop-motion video clips. We shot the feather scenes at Laura’s studio, Laura’s parents’ home, my own studio, and outdoors at the beautiful Tews Falls Conservation Area, whose shady forest paths lead up to The Peak. Here’s a video of me working with Lissa Hill, who did a great job assisting us in hauling camera gear and costume materials, and animating the feathers up on The Peak. She kept her cool, even though it was often frustrating to work with our lightweight actors in very windy conditions.

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In the end, I’d shot about 1500 photos and processed them to 1080i high definition stop-motion clips of each scene. Some scenes ended up on the digital cutting-room floor. There’s this scene, for instance, that didn’t make it into the film. We shot it as an alternate beginning for the Blue Feather’s journey, just in case the weather didn’t co-operate with our plans to shoot Blue crying out of the graffiti wall.

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

After assembling all of the stop-motion clips into their proper sequence, I auditioned a number of different musical tracks. I settled on Under the Kadam Tree from Stockmusic.com. It is one of those rare stock music pieces that doesn’t sound like stock music. I thought the slightly mystical feel created by the tabla and sitar instrumentation, combined with a sort of unexpected jaunty tempo really lent itself well to the mood we were trying to create in the film.

The last step was to create the credits. This was the only segment shot at my studio using studio light. The rest had all been done using natural light, to keep the feel and color as consistent as possible. I designed the credits in PowerPoint and printed them out on cream-colored textured paper. When Laura saw that I’d created one that said “The End,” she was slightly appalled. “It’s not the end,” she said, “It’s the beginning.” Of course, she was exactly right. I quickly replaced that slide with a new one that was more appropriate, and in the end, we found our beginning.

While we were in California, we wanted to do a photo shoot on the beach. She found a couple of sticks on the ground, and with a few scraps of fabric from a local textile store, she fashioned a brilliant flying rainbow bird costume. We scouted an amazing location: the Torrey Pines State Reserve, in La Jolla. The reserve is home to a stunning beach, backed with high cliffs. Boulders, layered with gold and purple hues had tumbled down the cliffs, and lay in ruggedly beautiful disarray on the sand. They seemed the perfect backdrop for our initial photos of the rainbow bird.

Next, I wanted to see the rainbow bird fly, so Laura headed into the surf for some leaps. A lot of leaps, actually. It took a lot of trial and error to find the right angle, pose, and to time the shots and leaps with the waves. I think Laura leaped about 120 times before we figured we had the right combination of sky, sea, sand and rainbow bird. The sky was overcast, the sun being obscured by the thick marine layer that invades the So-Cal shores at this time of year. There was still ample light, though, allowing very fast shutter speeds for freezing those leaps in mid-air. After we’d exhausted our quota of leaps, it was time to cool off by splashing into the Pacific Ocean. As a side note, jumping into the ocean in your clothes is only fun until about five minutes after you get out. Then it’s just damp and clammy. It was still worth it though!

Later on, I reviewed the images on my laptop. I couldn’t help but wonder if the photos of the colorful rainbow bird would have been better with a bright blue sky. The next day, after we’d moved up the coast to San Clemente, and checked into a motel that can only be described as “kitschy,” the sun came out. It had turned into the perfect blue-sky California day that I’d envisioned when we’d started talking about this shoot. I persuaded Laura to don the rainbow bird costume once again and we walked down to the beach.

Many more leaps ensued. Finally, a hundred and fifty more leaps into the shoot, Laura announced that it was enough.

Here’s the final image that we chose from the many that we shot over those two glorious days at the beach. I feel that it captures the mystical character of the rainbow bird with a slightly unusual perspective. I shot it from a low angle, close to Laura with my 24-70mm f2.8L lens at 24mm. I asked her to leap as close to me as she could, so the wings would brush over my head as she passed me. This is what it took to exaggerate the perspective and get that shot that stood out from the others. To obscure her footprints in the wet sand, we timed it so she would leap just as the white foam surf washed under her while she was in the air. This helped to further the illusion of flight. I’m very happy with this image. I think all the elements finally came together in the moment to create a photo better than either of us could have imagined ahead of time. That’s my favorite way to work.

This rainbow bird photo is the final photo that we shot for our book Live Your Spirit, which is now available at Blurb.

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.

Anyway, Laura is a bursting fountain of ideas. She’ll bring an idea to me, and it’s up to me to compress it into the rectangular frame of a photo. In a recent shoot, Laura wanted to put a black fairy in a swamp with an interesting dead tree. She’d found this location on a drive in the country, and asked if we could do a photo there. I scouted the location with her, and we decided the tree would make a great counter-balance to a sculptural costume piece she’d made in her studio. The sculpture, along with the tree, would form the wings of the black fairy, and communicate the concept of her connection to nature. Whenever there’s an opportunity to scout a location before the shoot, I do it. Sometimes time constraints or other circumstances don’t allow this, but if it’s at all possible, I’ll take the opportunity. Scouting a location allows you to come prepared for any difficulties the site may present, as well as giving you an idea what time of day and weather conditions will yield the best shooting conditions.

I took the photos above on the day of the shoot. These “sketches” are an important part of my editing process as we move towards getting the final shot. I tried various combinations of pose and camera position and orientation. I experimented with different focal lengths to try to come up with a good balance between drama and distraction.

As a side note, one factor of primary importance to me is the comfort of the model or subject of the photo. If the person you’re shooting is uncomfortable, you’re almost certain to get a bad photo of them. This is one reason Laura wasn’t wearing her costume in the sketch photos until we needed it to figure out the composition. I don’t want to feel rushed because she might be feeling uncomfortable or awkward in a costume. So, we avoid putting the costume on until absolutely necessary.

There were a lot of competing elements in this location, including trees, bushes, tall grasses, reflections, clouds, etc. I wanted to keep the black fairy clear of distractions, but in balance with other environmental elements so she would stand out. At the same time, we were limited by the fact that the tree had to be in the right position in the frame to form that other wing. In the end, I found just the right spot and focal length to get the shot. Laura was standing on a chair, which was slowly but surely sinking into the marshy ground; we had to work quickly once her costume was in place, otherwise our whole setup would have toppled into the swamp! Laura did a great job of looking serene, even as the chair inexorably tilted towards the water. We’d been blessed by a stormy-looking sky that day, so I snapped a series of bracketed shots so I could maintain the detail of those beautiful clouds. Later, I discovered that judicious processing of the RAW file allowed me to extract the detail from just a single exposure.

Here's the final image of Laura Hollick as the Black Fairy in the swamp.

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.

Because I had a good idea of what the finished image would look like, I was able to capture all of the elements on the day of the shoot. I knew I wanted the water in the bath to be some kind of color. In Photoshop, it’s relatively easy to change a color to some other color, but to realistically add color to something that doesn’t have color is difficult to do–at least for me, because I’m a photographer, not a painter! Coloring clear water would have been nearly impossible for me. So, we used some tempera paint to tint the water blue. As we added the paint to the tub, I shot a bunch of frames of the blue paint clouding the clear water, just in case they’d come in useful later.

I set up a bare strobe to bounce light off the white ceiling. This gave us some bright and even light from above. Then we experimented with a few different poses to get the base photo. We ended up with the pose below because Laura’s body made an interesting and attractive shape, and we were able to cover everything that needed to be covered. I had Laura swish the water around in the tub before each shot to create some texture in the water and to further obscure herself.

Once I got the images into Photoshop, I started creating the rainbow effect. I tried a few different methods with masking, gradients, and hue and saturation layers. Eventually, I settled on using those images of the paint clouds in the clear water, because they were the only thing that looked organic and realistic enough to create that rainbow bath effect we wanted. I made a composite of several of these clouds, rotating them and shifting their hue and saturation to make them different colors.

When layered on top of the bath image, this became the base for the rainbow effect. I used vector masks to allow non-water areas to show through. The Wacom tablet really helps in creating these masks. Touch sensitivity allows you to vary the brush size and pressure so that you can create smooth blends. I added a number of other layers of paint clouds of different colors, using different blending modes until it looked just right. Here’s the layers palette so you can see the various components.

The challenge was to control which colors made it into the finished image, because it had to look bright and not muddy, colorful but not too cluttered. The final image actually didn’t use all of the color layers that I’d created. It was nice to have the options, but in the end, we decided on a simpler color combination that’s really in-line with Laura’s branding.

The final step was to put it into context on a banner that could be used on Laura’s website. I used more paint clouds to make it balance with the text and the white background. Voila!

Here's a photo I took that Laura Hollick uses as her profile image. I love that it quickly illustrates her unique style and beauty.

If you’ve been on the Internet at all in the last few years, you’ll have been asked at least once to provide a profile picture. Whether you’re surfing social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, chatting on instant messaging progams like MSN Live Messenger, Google Talk, Skype, or flirting it up on dating sites like eHarmony, Lavalife, Match.com, you’re going to be encouraged to upload an image to represent you. And why not? Your profile picture is your online face. It has the power to instantly tell the viewer more about you than your name or anything you can write about yourself.

Experts on personal branding say that you should pick one photo and use that consistently to represent yourself online, no matter where you register. I can buy that as a strategy for personal branding, especially for people who are online for professional purposes. Other people treat the profile picture more casually, like an article of clothing or as an accessory that can change with their moods or needs.

I always love it when my friends and clients use the photos I’ve taken of them as their Facebook profile photos. Whether they’re candid snapshots, promotional photos or headshots, it’s an honor to know that I’ve captured something about them that they’re proud to show to the world.

I’m considering creating a photo package for people who want me to make online profile pics for them. In the name of market research, I’ve made a super-sophisticated, mega-scientific little poll about profile pictures. I’d love to have your input. You can check as many answers as you want.

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.

So, thank you to everyone who came to see the show. We’ve got lots more planned. In fact, we’ve got three major shoots to do before the end of the month, adding to this series! I’ll post updates as I have them.

We’re going to have some nice publicity too. View Magazine is putting us on the cover of the issue that comes out on August 6, just a day before the exhibition opens. Laura and I collaborated with the fantastic hair and makeup artist Sue Upton to create a really fun image for that cover that ties into some of the themes of Birth Your Dreams. Here’s a video we made during that photoshoot.

The reception is at the Carnegie Gallery in Dundas on August 7, 2009 at 7pm and it goes until around 9pm. If you’re in this area, please stop by the opening reception. It’s shaping up to be a pretty incredible event. If you can’t make it to the reception, the show runs until the end of August. Drop me a note if you want to swing by any time during the month, and maybe I’ll be able to give you a personal tour of the exhibition. For more info, see the Facebook event.