Quick photo: This is me dressed in soccer gear wearing my #10 Francesco Totti jersey. I was in the studio the other day playing around with capturing some action imagery and decided to jump in and try my hand at some action posing myself. I absolutely love the work by photographer Joel Grimes and greatly admire his style. His images are so gritty and engaging. Hopefully one day I will get the pleasure of photographing some top athletes like he has.

A friend of mine recently sent me a little tutorial video on how to create incredible beauty images using only a single beauty dish light and a do-it-yourself reflector. In the video titled “One Light Beauty Tutorial”, photographer Sean Armenta goes over the steps required to create beauty photographs. He talks about setting up the beauty dish and how to use it effectively to light the model’s “t-zone”, and what settings he uses in order to capture a “zero adjustment raw file”. The most interesting part about the tutorial is that Sean uses a reflector that he made himself. After only watching the video once, I was eager to try it out.

I picked up some foam core at a local print house, some reflective paper and silver duct tape from an art supply store, grabbed my pencil, my ruler and my exacto knife, and went to work. I cut the foam core into three pieces, attached them with the tape (creating hinges) and then attached the reflective paper to each surface. The result was a triflector that closes up nicely for storage. Here is a quick photo I took with my phone of the initial pieces.

With my newly created triflector, model Kim Ma, and make-up artist Darlene Brink, we headed off to the studio to try it all out. One big difference between my setup and Sean’s setup, is that I opted to raise each fold of my reflector instead of leaving it flat as he does in the video. The result, which you can see in my images here, was that I ended up with a tiny trio of catch-lights on the under side of Kim’s eyes. I quite liked how it looked, so I opted against using a small mirror to create the extra catch-light that Sean did. If I had kept my reflector flat, then there would have only been only one reflective surface, resulting in one catch-light.

We had a lot of fun doing this shoot. Kim’s ability to make all of the subtle movements and adjustments required to capture the beauty of her face in a really powerful image were definitely tested. I had never really shot much beauty in the past, but I really enjoyed it and I’m really happy with the results we got that day. I can definitely see myself doing a lot more of it. I also can’t wait to use my do-it-yourself reflector again.

Be sure to check out more of Sean’s videos at his Vimeo page or have a look at the amazing photographic work on his website, seanarmenta.com.

This was another fun project with the folks over at MediumRare. They needed team photos for another client, Open Door Mortgages. Similarly to the photographs I took for Evoco, they wanted photographs for a website design that would showcase the staff at Open Door Mortgages in a fun and inviting manner. Big thanks to Bryan Maniotakis, the Art Director over at MediumRare, and to Pam Hyde, Project Manager at MediumRare, for helping me with the shoot. Special thanks to Tim Lacroix and his team for giving me the opportunity to photograph them.

You can see Tim and his team on their new website at www.opendoormortgages.ca

I was asked to photograph the executive team of Evoco. Honored as one of Canada’s fastest growing companies by PROFIT Magazine back in 2008, I was excited to be given the opportunity to photograph such a prestigious team. Their website was being redesigned and they wanted some fresh new photographs to showcase their team in a fun and inviting manner. It was a successful project that I had a lot of fun doing and I am very pleased with the results.

Special thanks to Leigh McDonald, the Creative Director over at MediumRare who designed Evoco’s new site, to Cindy Audley at Evoco for helping me with the shoot, and to the entire executive team at Evoco for doing such a wonderful job.

You can check out the team on their new website at www.evoco.com

For my entire my life up until now, I have had hair on my head. Having to take the extra 10 minutes in the morning for hair maintenance was something that just became routine. I have always had fine hair, so keeping it short but styled was the only way to keep me from looking homeless. However, this past weekend and for the first time in my life, I shaved my head. I didn’t go right down the scalp with a blade, or as my friends have been suggesting, “Bic it”, but I did slap a guard on my trimmer and went to town… the whole way.

The number one question I get regarding this new look is, “Why’d you do it?”. My answer: I’m not really sure. I guess I wanted a change. I guess I was bored with the hair style I had been maintaining for the last 11 years. I don’t really know. A close friend of mine used to buzz his hair, but has since abandoned that style, which has resulted in this. I’ve heard that shaving your head can reveal some pretty interesting shapes, but apparently I have a decently shaped head (thank goodness) and I have also heard that once you do it, your hair may not grow back the same, which I won’t be able to confirm or deny for some time.

What I CAN tell you is that for some odd reason, whether I was just too dumb to notice before or not, women are noticing in an obvious way. I like to refer to my new haircut as “The David Beckham“. Not just because of the style, but take this recent experience for example; Just driving yesterday to a local alterations store here in Calgary, I caught two different women in completely separate cars full-on rubber-necking me in my truck. Not gonna lie… that alone is a good enough reason to keep this style for the summer, especially since I wasn’t sure if I even liked it or not.

Every year, something happens on March 2nd. Today is March 2nd. Today is my birthday.

When I first moved to Calgary five and a half years ago, I knew one person who had a birthday on March 2nd… me. Only a few weeks after moving to Alberta, I found two other people who shared the exact same birth date as myself (the story in which we all found out at the exact same time in the exact same room is a good one, so if you’re ever having a beer with me, ask me to tell it). One of them, David Gluzman, has since become one of my best friends here in Cowtown. But believe it or not, I have since found others with the same birth date as us. People I know personally too, including iStock’s famous Brentman. Pretty awesome.

Beside the fact that I know a lot of March 2nd birthdays, I also know at least one person who has a birthday for every day of the first week of March, 1st through 7th. I won’t list them all, but yesterday was the birthday of my friend Mikael who is an Information Architect. Tomorrow is Troy, a designer at iStockphoto, and in a couple of days I have two more friends sharing yet another similar birth date. One of them is my very good friend Adrian Bryksa, who is more knowledgeable about wine than I am about my own shoe size. The other is my friend Marisha, who is more commonly referred to as The Lotus Queen, due to her being the host of Calgary’s longest running drum n’ bass show called Remote Emissions.

Marisha loves to model, and since I love taking photos, it was only a matter of time before we got together to create some awesome images. I don’t want to show them all, but I have posted one of my favourites from a shoot we did together recently to prove to people that the stereotype we’ve all heard is in fact true… female DJs are always hot. Be sure to listen in to Marisha’s show which can be heard every Friday from 10:30p – 12:00a (MST) on CJSW Radio 90.9 fm in Calgary, or check out her MySpace page for more info.

Aside from all of the friends who have March birthdays, I even share the month with my entire family… my mom, my dad, and even my younger brother. Happy birthday to us all and to all of the other Pisces out there.

PS – I might continue to play around with image sizes/placement a bit more, but for now, I’m liking the large format as seen in this post.