From an online course project I made recently with the wonderful Claudia van Oortmerssen. I’m taking this course with the intent of seeing how it shakes up and changes my approach to the craft. There’s nothing worse than settling into a too-comfortable habit. Always stretch.
Impending rain. A stretch of Prince Edward Island’s north shore darkens with the rapid approach of a storm cloud. August 2018.
The wonderful make-up artist Nathalie van Spaandonck preps model Jeanne Colette in the offices of The Face Paris before our Raphael de Lacroix shoot in September.
A glimpse of late evening light shining off the leaves of a young tree, clearly benefiting from its position in a small clearing. A certain proportion of success in life is down to blind luck.
In September, I visited for the first time this beautiful pile of stones on the Left Bank in Paris. The Panthéon is an absolute wonder; walking through it slowly and studying its textures and shadows and details and aura soon brought tears to my eyes. There’s something intensely comforting and inspiring about this level of human art.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
From a model test this summer with Gloria Vandekemp of Peggi Lepage Models and Plutino Models (MUA Brooke Walker). It amazes me how the smallest things can change the mood of a picture, and the outward image of a person, so easily. Take a warm-hearted, Christian young woman. And hand her a chain.
6000 RPM and climbing. My A3 tears along a short straightaway before Turn 4 at last weekend’s KWRC rallycross.
Approaching the go line. A windshield shot from my first rallycross event, this one held at the Humberstone Speedway in Port Colborne, Ontario. I came fourth in my category (4-wheel drive, forced induction) with my Audi A3 against a Subaru-heavy field – and some superb drivers. I’ll have to improve a lot to catch them.
A first image from today’s model test with Allie Hafner of B&M Model Management. We shot in an apartment in west Toronto, with beautifully constrained natural light wending its way inside through close-packed roof lines and dusty windows.
The Grand Mosque of Paris was built in 1926 to honor the roughly 100,000 Muslim soldiers who were killed
fighting for France during the First World War. Later, during the German occupation in World War II, rector Si Kaddour Benghabrit arranged for many Jews to be given Muslim identity papers – even going so far as to inscribe a grandfather’s name on a blank tombstone which was then placed in a nearby Muslim cemetery – to keep them out of the hands of the Nazis. Unfortunately there has only been one on-the-record witness to these actions and little documentation (which is to be expected, since the practice had to survive German inquiries) apart from a contemporaneous memo written by the French foreign ministry noting that the occupation authorities had demanded that the mosque cease all such activities, so scholars are divided about just how many Jews were saved in this way. Still, the basic story is given credence by most who have looked into it, even if the scale is disputed.
We take our tales of human goodness where we can find them.
