I must be very careful in the waters I tread in during these next few paragraphs. I’m on a top secret covert mission to leak previously redacted information about the latest Christmas Card you may have recently received from Kevin Clark’s Headshots | Food | Lifestyle Studio in Vancouver, BC. At any moment Kevin may be done his current shoot and characteristically wander over to see what exciting things are happening with Andrea and myself in the Digital Dept. Well, I’ll tell you what’s happening…HIGH TREASON! In the next few minutes, I’ll be showing you exactly what sort of devious plot is underlying this year’s Christmas card. And whatever you do after absorbing this information, do not reveal your source to the man they call Kevin Clark, my Christmas bonus depends on it.
So onto the project we just recently completed and sent out to as many of our friends and clients as we could before we ran out of envelopes, stamps and budget for more of such postal necessities. Every year, Kevin and Trish, his wife and head makeup artist, photograph their three children, Hunter (the oldest and longest haired of the bunch), Nolan and Holden (the two lads of varying ages). The first series of images you see below are the result of an intensive search for the main theme of this year’s project which was something of an apocalyptic feel with the two oldest children playing the part of angels, rescuing the youngest from some imagined sort of certain peril, or at least a slight amount of general discomfort.
Wondrously enough, the very day after Kevin shot this location, the whole mess was completely hauled away and cleaned up. He barely was able to squeeze his lens through a chain link fence and from what I understand of Kevin’s telling of the shoot details…protect himself and the equipment from several menacing Japanese Whisker Dragons all attacking in dizzying unison (which ironically were tatooed with images of themselves), a fleet of unarmed futuristic superbots and a fairly angry cocker spaniel. Needless to say, stitching these 3 shots together was quite an impressive feat.
The following series is of course the children themselves. Photographed in our extended studio area (the storage locker in the basement). And of course as kids are kids, it took another 3 images just to get decent looking mugs on these little ones that would work for the final shot.
And here of course is the result of that first blend revealing our wonderful amenities and all 3 kids in all their dynamic glory. Take note here that little Hunter’s toes are cut off. Rob is not pleased at this stage, but has many more feet to joyfully extract from other images to replace these.
Of course there was also the small stuff that you don’t really think about (angel wing straps, a plastic sword that needed to look more like an authentic barbarian broadsword etc.) that I could bore you to death over but simultaneously delight myself with repeated ego inflation. But it’s nearly Christmas, so let ALL be merry.
This next image places the kids into the shot and though it looks fairly close to done as-is, I would say this is only about 1/3 of the way complete.
The 2 images below are a sample of the lighting that we created within photoshop to add some ambiance to the environment. I’ve seen a few samples of this technique in the past and from the amount of night photography I’ve been doing lately, I thought it woudl be fun to attempt a recreation of “natural” artificial lighting within a scene.
This whole project has spanned a few months while we put all the individual pieces together and it’s been great fun and a great challenge. I’m personally quite proud of having the chance to work on this and get something strong with the final result.
And below is the full card with the back folded out. Hopefully you have received yours, but if not we probably don’t have your address!Thank you to Kevin for his great location find and perfect photography, Trish for her work getting these kids to cooperate for yet another year (not to mention creating such photogenic children), and a huge thanks to Andrea for putting the time in to hunt down nearly 1000 addresses and organize the important part of Christmas cards…sending them! We all put in a lot of hard work so here’s hoping that Canada Post didn’t lost all of them in transit.
And of course thanks to everyone we’ve met and worked with this past year. We’ve had a lot of positive changes and development in the studio this year and hope to be able to share more of these projects with you as they come to fruition. Check back soon…next up is a new website launch for Kevin Clark Headshots.
– ROBERT MARKS
Studio Manager
Kevin Clark Photography | Headshots | Food | Lifestyle
Vancouver BC
