Kevin Thom - Hamilton, Toronto, Ontario Photographer

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 Hollick and I shot a promotional photo to advertise of her upcoming Creativity Cleanse telecourse. It’s always a pleasure to shoot something that has such a strong concept just from the name. It wasn’t difficult to come up with the idea of a multicolored bath.

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!

I went to bed around 8:30 last night, and woke up fully refreshed at 4 in the morning. So, I figured I’d make a little walk down to the Bund to try to catch the sunrise over Pudong’s spectacular futuristic skyline. The only problem is, there was no way to access the boardwalk area that would have given me a view of the river and the skyline. There are billboards up everywhere proclaiming the improvements that are coming in time for the world expo that Shanghai is hosting in 2010. One such improvement is a comlete demolition and rebuilding of that waterfront area. Unfortunately, that means that there’s no access to it.

Dad and I spent the next four hours wandering around the old part of the city, including a park filled with seniors exercising, swinging their arms in vigorous calesthenics, and repeatedly slapping circulation into their skinny legs. There was a group of them grooving to pulsing dance music too. Fun.

We returned to the hostel by about 10am, feeling like we’d already had a full day.

One thing that’s new since I was here last is that many more sites seem to be blocked by the Great Firewall of China. Facebook and Twitter are both verboten. Oddly, I can still get on Twitpic.