Another glorious photograph of Les Artisans D’azure this time riding horses generally provided by the lovely Catherine Toussaint. These shots were taken in mid day sunlight so I did my best to overpower the sun with my beautiful Profoto D1′s provided by LL Lozeau but unfortunately I couldn’t quite get rid of all of the shadows… Bah!!

Shooting with animals was honestly quite a challenge, the horses were really not quite used to crowds and my initial idea of having horses galloping towards me didn’t quite work out. Maybe next time!

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By this time the sun had finally hidden behind the clouds and I could finally overpower the sun to shoot this group photo. This time around, all elements were actually present (yes, we had people crawling over the roof!). I wanted to try something a little different so I actually shot the whole thing in four seperate shots to create a group panorama. Exploiting the fact that profotos at full power require 7 seconds of retouch time, I shot the subjects farther away first so that they’d be properly exposed and wouldn’t expose the heroes closer to us! Friend and retoucher Chester Van Bommel (www.artsome.be) – one of the subjects that we’ll be shooting in our Von Wong does Europe tour -www.indiegogo.com/vonwongdoeseurope actually helped put this whole thing together, photoshop & all.

Read the rest of the story here.

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Two weeks ago, I received a message from one of my fellow photographers Kelso, who told me that the folks over at Les Artisans D’azure were extremely interested in working with me. I’ve always been a huge medieval buff so I made some time in my crazy schedule and squeezed in a quick visit. When I got there, it was like being a kid in a toy store… I was running around having the time of my life checking out everything they had to offer. By the time I left the store, we had already set a shoot date, found ourselves an awesome location to shoot at as well as developped a vague story. By the evening, after a couple facebook shout-outs, we were at 20 models.

A couple days later, I had assembled my assistants, makeup and video crew. A week later, we had horses confirmed. A couple days after that,LL Lozeau agreed to sponsor about 40,000$ worth of profoto flashes for my shoot. A couple days before the shoot, we were at 55 confirmed participants… Things were going amazingly smoothly…

The day before the photoshoot was a whole different matter… weather forecast announced -3 degrees the day before with snow, hail, 30km/hr winds and general unhappiness all around!!! Myself and a couple others set out to camp out the night before to get in some location scouting and planning and had a merry campfire in the wind, hail and more. Of course, no signal at the medieval village supplied by L’Atelier du Loisir meant that we had no idea how many people were actually going to show up the day of the shoot so we kept fingers crossed while huddling under the blankets.

I was pleasently surprised to see over 80% of the people that had commited actually showed up under the cold rain to join us for this amazing photoshoot. We had the most amazing committed models trudging and shivering through rain and mud just to take a couple epic photographs.

Here’s one of those shots.

 Be sure to check back soon… Behind the Scenes video by Laurence and her crew coming up soon

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Costume Design: Les Artisans d’Azure - www.artisansdazure.com

Samuel Tremblay Gagnon

Marc André Thibault

Steeve Verville

Maxime Turgeon

Genevieve Cotineau

Stephane Normandin

Sponsors:

Calimacil - www.calimacil.com
L’Atelier du Loisir - www.gn.qc.ca
LL Lozeau – Profoto flashes - www.lozeau.com

Makeup:
Jessica Renahan, Lisa-Marie Charron, Patricia Lapointe

Hair: Jazz Hairstylist, Manuelle Lessard

Assist: Allison B., Jessika Chiasson, Nadia Zheng

BTS Photography: Claude Campagna Lupien, Monique Guillbault

Video: Laurence Turcotte-Fraser, Sael Simard

Photoshop: Chester Van Bommel - www.artsome.be