I’m leaving for Lebanon tonight for just over two weeks. If you are trying to contact me, please use email, and I will get back to you as soon as I return.

And yes, I will be taking lots of pictures to show you all

There are two key aspects to photography: getting the shot, and post-processing the image. When I first started with photography, I was more concerned with post-processing than getting a good shot. I remember taking dozens upon dozens of pictures and looking through them to find the best ones to process. Then I would spend one or two hours a night practising retouching on different images, posting the ones I liked best to Flickr.

As I started doing commissioned work, I became more aware of the necessity for good shots. I only had one 1-2 hour span to get the images I wanted, unlike before when I was taking self portraits, or even working with friends and relatives as models. As the pictures I took improved, the amount of time I had to spend in Photoshop decreased, and so did my concentration on post-processing.

With the shots from this image, I did my best to try out new types of processing. Some worked out, while others didn’t. Nonetheless, the images below are what I thought were the best of the shoot. Let me know what you think of the new (orange) processing technique.

Just as a miscellaneous/potentially interesting fact, I’d been watching Lost for two weeks leading up to this particular shoot, and the night before I had gotten maybe 9 episodes watched in the day. So if you see a deserted-island theme in a few of the pictures, that’s probably where the inspiration came from.

Like a few of the other models on here, I found Emma-Lee through Model Mayhem (you can see her profile here). Within 3 days of me messaging her a request to shoot, she replied back, and in another 3 days, we were out shooting. Normally, I have control over at least a few of the key elements in a shoot: the props, the outfit, the make up, and the lighting. But in this case, the only things set in advance were the date, time, and the location of the shoot. With relatively little planning, photographers can have no idea what to expect. Especially when they have never met the model before.

But when I met Emma-Lee for the first time, fully done up in her $7 H&M dress, and her cute Japanime-styled make up, I took one look into my closet of clothing (my back up, “just in case” she wasn’t wearing something I liked), and decided she knew exactly what she was doing, and looked better in what she chose than anything I could give her. We went out in the crazy heat (just in case some of you don’t know, Toronto’s had a heat wave for the past week), and took pictures in two different dresses before we got tired of all the mosquitos, and packed up and left.

As young as she may be, Emma-Lee is definitely one of my favourite models at the moment. She knows how to style herself, she’s got a kick-ass personality, and she’s just downright entertaining to be around. I hope to work with her again, so keep an eye out for her on this blog if you liked these pictures.

There are a few more photos uploaded onto here than I usually have displayed in my posts, but that’s because I felt had so many good images, I hardly knew which I liked best. That being said, I don’t know which I should be uploading onto my Flickr account or to use on my Model Mayhem profile. It would help me out a lot if you guys could tell me which you liked best. Without further ado, the images from this past Saturday:

Approximately a month ago, I held a contest over at Model Mayhem for the most unique looking dress. Doreen (whose Model Mayhem account you can see here) won with her lovely origami-style dress. Just last Friday, we met up at Finch station and got to work on some gorgeous looking photographs. Seeing how colourful the dress was, I brought along a few balloons as props, and in combination with some amazing make up from her friend, we had a great shoot in the making.

These photographs of Jade and Liana were taken in November of 2009. Jade was the winner of my Facebook Frenzy Competition. She won a free photo shoot with one additional person, and so she brought along her close friend Liana.

I’m posting these images for two reasons, firstly, to get a little more content up on my blog, since it looked like it needed a little more variety, and second, to inform you all that I will be having a few contests coming up where you will be able to win free shoots, just like these girls did last year. Keep checking up on this page and on my Facebook Page (which you can find here) to see if the contests have begun.

Mythology has always interested me a great deal. Although I do not know very much about Germanic Mythology, I thought it would be interesting to start an ongoing project of taking characters and creatures from cultural mythologies and putting them into a more modern light. In this shoot I tried to combine elements of fashion photography with the two-thousand some year old concept of the elf.

The model in this shoot is Francisca Garcia. You can find her on Model Mayhem here.

On the 16th of April, one of my cousins was taking a walk with his parents and found a cardinal lying on the road with a broken leg. He assumed a car had come by over and run over its leg, but since he wasn’t there to witness what had happened, this was simply an assumption. He and my aunt and uncle started walking past, but he couldn’t find it in him to leave the poor bird behind, so he picked it up and took it to my grandparents’ house to take care of.

They tried feeding it whatever they had available in the house: fruits, bread, everything. It ate a little, but it was in so much pain that it passed away the next day. My cousin had me come over and take some pictures of it before they buried it. Below are pictures of the cardinal in my hands, my cousin’s hands, my grandfather’s, and being held by my brother.

Welcome to my photography blog. Here I will be uploading photographs from personal projects and writing about photography related ventures of mine. All of the photographs I upload here will be of models who have signed model release forms, and thus any picture on this site can be licensed. Please see the contact section for information on how to contact me if you are interested in this. Many of the photographs are also available as fine art prints, so please email to inquire if you are interested in purchasing a print.