You have all seen her at the mercy of my camera before, usually on stage with her fire red phoenix hair blowing in the wind as she gracefully sings out her country jams in the summer sun. Who am I talking about? .. well who else.. the incredible KELSI MAYNE.
Kelsi hit me up with a message on a Thursday saying she needed new images shot for some summer festival announcements and some other releases through out 2019. This shoot was last minute, we only had a few days to find a location to shoot in and get the images edited and out within.. I think it was 4 days. Game On!
We reached out to some people and ended up having a mutual friend (Scott), who was willing to let us use his beautiful home on the following Saturday and so the one-on-one photo session was born.
Kelsi is a very hard working woman. She is a Nurse, a Country music artists, an Actress and was a Nationally Ranked Hurdler! We first met in my home town Woodstock Ontario, where she was performing at the Woodstock Truck Show put on annually by our friend Scott Verbruggen, all proceeds from this event goes to the local Special Olympics. Kelsi saw me handing out business cards to the other bands that were performing after each set and she came up to ask if she could have one to see the pics afterwards, we got to talking and a new friendship was born! Since then I have photographed Kelsi at the Emerging Artists Showcase at the CMAO’s in London Ontario, as well as in Dresden Ontario at their Kinstock Festival, where she opened the show along with Kansas Stone, Andrew Hywatt and The Reklaws.
The ‘Mayne’ image we shot was being used to release Kelsi’s artist announcement for this summers Big Valley Jamboree in Camrose, Alberta where Kelsi will be sharing the ‘Mayne’ stage with acts such as: Toby Keith, Old Dominion, Kane Brown, Lindsay Elle, Meghan Patrick, Billy Ray Cyrus, Brooks & Dunn and many more. Kelsi will also be performing in Havelock Ontario at the Havelock Country Jamboree in August.
Also Keep an eye out for the release of Stephen King’s short story (movie) WILLA because, yep.. you guessed it, Kelsi is in the movie.. not only is she in it but has a Title Role… does Kelsi look familiar to you? .. well that’s probably because you’ve seen her as the lead female in another country music artists video.. if you have seen her in this you will know her as ‘CHERRY BOMB’. River Town Saints brought Kelsi in as the lead role in their video for Cherry Bomb where she did an amazing job.
Can’t wait to see where Kelsi goes in 2019, all I know is that it will be up.. she is on a roll and shows no signs of slowing down. It was an honour and pleasure to work with Kelsi and get to know her band over the last year, they are all amazing people and I’m pumped every time I get to run into them at shows.
For now I can only release two images that we shot from our shoot as we want to keep them under wraps until Kelsi gets to release them through out the year.
Portrait
Natalie & Sergio Maternity Fairy Tale Shoot
Natalie & Sergio: Maternity
Read MoreBOHEMIAN PICNIC
She's the kind of woman who loves life, nature, travel and experiences life to the fullest while being thankful for her experiences.
Flower crows, nick nacks, dresses, jewelry... this was the back bone of our shoot. Bohemian Picnic was the theme and our location was in a big backyard which was set up as the bohemian picnic. Cassidy is a good friend of mine and a fantastic Hair Stylist, we have worked with each other for all kinds of different shoots as I'm sure you've seen before in past blog posts.
Not only is Cassidy a wiz with hair, but she was the one who set up this fantastic set to photograph on with all of her own personal Nick Nacks. Weather wise, we were a little worried as it was pretty cloudy and the forecast called for rain, but that wasn't going to stop us. Lucky enough for us it started to clear up and the sun was diffused through the clouds, giving us some nice soft even light.
With music blaring, some wine flowing and the creative juices fired up we started off with the shoot. I wasn't to sure if I was going to use lighting or not, but after snapping a few shots and seeing that the sun was out enough to cause some tough shadows, the lights came out. We wanted to get a bunch of "Hippy-Flower Child" images as well as some creative portfolio work that I had in my back pocket ( The bike shot with the crazy chunky cloud sky).
We had a ton of fun on this shoot along with Cassidy's sister who was on set to help out and watch the shoot go down and see how it's done because she is thinking about doing a shoot of her own in the near future. This shoot lasted about 4-5 hours, it was more of a hang out and shoot kind of thing, just having some fun, getting great shots and experimenting with lighting and different techniques. Hope you enjoy the images from this shoot - Shutter Click.
Hair/Fashion/Glamour OH MY!
Cans of hair spray flying, make up pallets blasting colour all over, dresses, shorts, shirts, bra's, shoes all around me. This was what it was like on set a few weekends ago in London, Ontario as I got together with Hair Stylists Cassidy and Jodie, jodie also does make up, to do a hair shoot for the Salon they work at.
Our goal was to set up some simple portraits to show case different elaborate hair styles so we can place some of the images in to hair competitions. But first, before we got into the hair shoot, we decided we would do a little photoshoot for Cassidy to get warmed up. We did the shoot in Jodi's loft which is gorgeous.. 13' high ceilings, crown moulding, all open concept, big windows and a rooftop with an old fire escape... as you can imagine it's a great location with endless possibilities. Due to living in Canada and it being winter.. the rooftop didn't work out for us because it was covered in deep snow, but it will be used this summer with out a doubt.
After Cassidy's shoot, the other model's ( Ellie, Alex and Shelby) showed up so we could get started on hair and make up, this was around 2pm. Alex and Ellie were up first, so we started shooting against my white seamless backdrop, shooting some head shots and some full lengths. It went pretty well, I found that the roll of seamless I have is only good for head shots.. it's only about 4-5' wide which doesn't work well for full body so we decided to move over to one of the walls in the loft and use that. Over all the day/night was a success, it was long ended up being about 11 hours.. but that was with breaks to change looks and change make up, change hair and lenses and lighting set ups.
This post is just a starter post for this shoot... Seeing as how these images are being entered into competitions I can't post a lot of them because we don't know which ones we are entering yet. The ladies are going through the contact sheets to select which images are to be edited for which categories, a lot of them I haven't even edited yet because I want to know which ones are being used instead of editing a bunch that we won't use at all.... Soooooo with that said, I'm going to use this post to show of just a few shots I did of Cassidy in our PRE shoot, and then i'll follow up to this blog post later after the hair images have been selected, edited and entered for competition. Hope you enjoy these images. - Shutter Click.