Large venues really push my physical and creative abilities as an event photographer. Just covering the main stage at the National Arts Centre would be enough to keep one person busy, but I like to throw a little extra into my work. Which is why I decided to do back-stage portraits at this years’ Cracking Up the Capital Comedy festival finale while simultaneously covering the sets of the wonderful stand-up comedians on stage.
It’s no secret that my favourite thing about photography is all the people I get to meet. I especially love taking their portraits in environmental situations that are relevant to them as a person or, at the very least, look cool. That’s why I was so happy when the editors at Ottawa Magazine asked me to take environmental portraits of three subjects for the 2014 Interiors issue.
Now, Ottawa Mag has their pick of photographers. The interiors issue is their big push at the beginning of the year and it’s the result of months and months of work. In this particular case my portraits would be paired-up to accompany the stunning interior photography of my good friends Younes and Amanda at DoubleSpace Photography. They would be shooting the interiors, and I would be photographing key individuals who worked on the projects. I had the added benefit of learning from their time on site, as the interior photographs were taken before the portraits.
I absolutely love shooting comprehensive campaign work for my clients. As a commercial photographer, working on images from the very inception of the concept is where I like to be. I was thrilled to receive a call from Claire at Bikram Yoga Ottawa to revamp her images for their new website and other potential ad material. She wanted to work with her current line of instructors, and she wanted the images to be bold and colourful. Perfect; those are right up my photographic alley.
I nearly forgot about these commercial food photographs I took for Suzy Q Doughnuts here in Ottawa last year. The shop is only a few blocks away from where I live. I was their second customer when they opened up and did as much as I could to recommend the crap out of them to make sure I would have a successful and steady stream of steaming delicious doughnuts directly down my street. I was also fortunate enough to be their choice of commercial photographer for a number of projects, one of which being some high-resolution images of their product.
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It’s hard to escape the need for a good professional portrait or headshot these days. Between social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or whatever else the kids are using these days an avatar that isn’t a heavily cropped cell-phone shot of your drunk with an ex boyfriend or girlfriend (you know the one I’m talking about) is pretty essential. Even if you don’t use your profiles professionally, or maybe you do but choose to be a little lax with your character (reference: my twitter stream). It’s certainly a self-fulfilling mission for me to say you need a professional photographer to take your portrait, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be me. There are loads of great photographers in Ottawa or wherever you live that are capable of taking that headshot. Maybe you have a friend who shoots for fun and they need a subject to beef up their portfolio, maybe you’ve been eyeing the work of a talented local and thought “one day, I’ll get one of those.”