Fun with hair!

There are a few more on Flickr.

I’m heading to Scotland in a few hours.  In the meantime, check out the new additions to my iStockPhoto portfolio!

The G20 summit is being held in downtown Toronto this weekend.  Today, there was a “peaceful demonstration” planned.  Approximately 4,000 people would meet at Queen’s Park, walk down University to Queen Street, then head West on Queen to Spadina, and then back up Spadina to Queen’s Park.

You can view all 150 of my pictures from today on Flickr.

It started out peaceful enough…

… with a few crazies.

Police lined up on Richmond to prevent people from heading South towards the security perimeter.

Something happened at Queen & Spadina that I did not see. People started running around yelling “TEAR GAS!” but I read online that it was smoke from a flare. After that, it got a little bit crazy. The protesters began heading back East along Queen Street instead of going up Spadina. Sometime in those 5 minutes, someone(s) smashed all of the windows of 2 police cars.

Police officers came and blocked the area that contained the two police cars. They all put on gas masks. Shortly after this, I headed home, since I live in the same block.

When I got home, I saw on CP24 that Starbucks at Queen & John had been smashed, so I went back outside.

The police officers had left the area, and I saw that people had painted the vandalized police cars.

I went back home and started transferring pictures. A few minutes later, my boyfriend asked “did you hear that?!” We looked out the window and there was black smoke coming up from Queen Street. I grabbed my camera and went back outside. Someone had lit the police car on fire.

It was surreal seeing people walk all over the street. Shortly after this, I saw a few people set the other police car on fire.

I watched from my balcony as cops were rushing protesters to push them North.  Just around the corner, protesters were becoming increasingly violent.  The whole thing was pretty scary and surreal.

Check out my Flickr set for more pictures from the G20 protests today.

Toronto Fringe Festival starts at the end of June!  I recently did some pictures for a sketch comedy group called Apocalypse Later.  Their show is called Everybody Panic! Here’s the description:

Marcel Dragonieri, Jocelyn Geddie, Brandon Hackett and Ann Pornel (writers and performers for sketch groups Etched in Sketch, Colonel Mustard, and The Bob, one of Canada’s longest running sketch comedy revues) present EVERYBODY PANIC!, a brand new sketch comedy show about the difficulties of life and the uncertainties of the future. Sharp, witty and inventive, EVERYBODY PANIC! tackles issues like love, hate, friendship, debt and monsters: you know, real life.

They were tons of fun to work with and I can’t wait to see the show.  (You should see it too!  Buy tickets!)

The 2-man band is called Automatic Toys (Myspace, Facebook) and they got in touch with me because they were throwing together a last minute music video shoot and wanted me to do some still photography.  It was at a sound stage in Mississauga, and a professional event lighting team was there with awesome lasers and fog machines and stuff.

At one point I was standing on a piece of plastic and lifted up by a forklift.  Everything was great until I lowered my camera from my face and realized how high I was and that I had nothing to hold on to, and I almost peed my pants.  It was fun though.  (I sat down after that.)

Good times.

Now there are 8!  It was hard to find a time for everyone to get together, and if you live in Toronto, you may recall that it was raining for most of this week.   With Wednesday night being our only option, I had to improvise in my tiny home studio.  When I say “tiny”, I mean that it’s a 10′x10′ room that 8 people (+ a photographer) wouldn’t fit into without lighting equipment and a backdrop.

I think we were able to come up with some creative ideas to get around the space confinements.

4 hours – and 800 pictures – later, I have a lot of compositing to do!  This is a work in progress, but the end result is going to be really fun.

I wanted to post today, because Your Heart has a show tonight at Supermarket in Toronto.  They also released their new album, Autumn, and a free companion EP, Fall.   Both are amazing!  Check them out.

More pictures to come.

I love photographing babies.  They have the best facial expressions!

And finally, I want to share this outtake because it makes me laugh every time.  This was when I was doing a few close portraits of 5-month-old Dominik and he decided to put his hand in his mouth.  Kathryn pulled it out and he made this face:

Awesome.

Before the holidays, the Toronto Strobist Group met in the studio for a fun shoot. My job ended up being to organize our models for the day, so I put up an ad on Craigslist and found these two girls. They’re in a band called SidePonyNation, and they were hilarious.  So much energy and lots of fun to work with. They were posing even before we had the lights set up.

You can see more pictures on Flickr.

This time last year, I had literally zero interest in studio photography. I was all about candid portraits in natural light. Well, I was wrong. Studio portraiture is fun.

This is Maria. She is a makeup artist and super cute model.

Model: Anna
Makeup: Elisa Doyon-Vachon