Melodie of Movement

Hula Hoop! (Click any image to see it larger)

I mentioned in last week's post that the cheery blossoms were just in bloom - a little late this year. Nevertheless we took full advantage and met up with Melodie of Movement in Toronto's High Park. Last week I also promised some hula hooping goodness, so here it comes....

Melodie is a radiant personality and a beautiful human being. It also helps that she knows how to use all that wavy hair as a really great prop!

Huge thank you as always to Cristy for helping out with the lights - as small as a 28" softbox is...it seems to catch the wind no matter what direction it's facing. She's been getting to know her way around that softbox pretty well lately!

This week there's not much of a tutorial, I'm afraid. See the Zack Arias post for more on this kind of lighting and balancing ambient. We'll get into cross-processing for that vintage look another time soon (see pictures below). For now if you're really interested, there are a zillion tutorials online - just google "cross-processing" or "lomo effect" or "lomography" +tutorial. I haven't found any single tutorial that I think has it all, but if you put them all together and do a little experimenting, you should be able to figure it out with some basic curves adjustments. Feel free to leave comments if you need any help....

Series shot with Canon 50mm 1.4 - such a great lens

Other than that, the theme of the warmer months is going to be portraits, portraits, portraits with as many people as I can fit into a Summer. I'm hoping to have a collection of interesting amazing people doing something special to produce a complete body of work that somehow fits together coherently so I can get a website up and running.

So...if you're an artist, performer or just someone with an interesting amazing look, attitude or style, let me know and we'll go out and do something creative together - don't be shy now....

Couldn't help myself - had to take some of these just before we met up with Melodie: