Jen and Michelle

This is the fourth of my five previews for my show this weekend. The details for said show can be found here.

This piece is simply entitle "Jen and Michelle" as it is a combination of two photos from two different shoots with two different girls named, you guessed it, Jen and Michelle. The two photos have had some colour tweaking and a basic filter thrown on them. Placing them side by side and off center on a white plain creates a very clean look.

Tomorrow I will have the final preview and a recap on Friday!

Ally at the Loading Dock

More great stuff from my shoot with Ally today. This is from a set up we did in Graffiti Alley down near Queen Street West.

I really like the high contrast and the side light. The graffiti makes the pictures very colourful and vibrant. I'm very much looking forward to working with Ally again in the future.

Quote of the Day: Dimitri Shostakovic

"A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one."

- Dimitri Shostakovic

Waiting for a Train

This is the third preview leading up to the exhibition I'm participating in at Studio 561 this Saturday. This picture, entitled "Waiting for a Train", is a highly altered photo from a photoshoot that I was less than pleased with. As opposed to other photos from the set, the original for this piece isn't terrible but it isn't particularly enthralling either.

The finished look is more consistent with recent work of mine, very bright and very clean looking. It was achieved by using the sketch and cutout filters in Photoshop and using the gradient feature in "blending modes" to provide a splash of colour.

Ally and the Beige Wall B&W

This is the first of several posts forth coming from the shoot I did last week with Ally. I'm fairly pleased with the results considering it was very much a last minute kind of thing.

Also this week I will have the remaining three previews for my exhibit this Saturday as well as the details for that event. Stay tuned, lots of exciting stuff on the way!

Just a Taste

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Ally. Ally is an aspiring young model from Buffalo who I had the pleasure of working with yesterday. I'll have plenty more from this shoot to share next week but this morning I thought I'd share a taste of what we did.

Inspiration Vol. 1: Hunter S. Thompson

As a creative person I have a lot of influences. As an artist who works in a visual medium, shockingly few of these influences are visual artists. In mulling over how I would go about putting together the first of what should be a series of posts about the people who inspire me, I figured I needed a way to tie in what I do to my appreciation of what these people have done. As such I've decided that rather than gushing on and on about the works of these people, I would do a couple photo composites of these people using photos I found through a simple Google search.

The first of these segments is dedicated to my favorite author, Hunter S. Thompson, the creator of gonzo journalism.

His Wikipedia entry has this description of his work:
"Thompson is often credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of writing that blurs distinctions between fiction and nonfiction. His work and style are considered to be a major part of the New Journalism literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which attempted to break free from the purely objective style of mainstream reportage of the time. Thompson almost always wrote in the first person, while extensively using his own experiences and emotions to color "the story" he was trying to follow. His writing aimed to be humorous, colorful and bizarre, and he often exaggerated events to be more entertaining."

For me, Thompson's work has helped shape a less rigid world view and a creative ethic based on challenging my own concepts of reality and what I see with my own two eyes.

"So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?"
- Hunter S. Thompson