Even though I’ve lived in New York since 1982, if someone asks me where I’m from I immediately say, “Edmonton!”, so when Terri Belley…the Art Director at Avenue Magazine…asked me to shoot a feature on another ex-Edmontonian, actress Catherine Mary Stewart, I jumped at the chance. I mean, this was the hot chick from “Night of the Comet”, “The Last Starfighter” and who can forget…“Weekend at Bernie’s”!!! And designer Michael Kaye…another native son of Edmonton now calling New York home…was gonna be providing the fashions.
But then reality kicked in. Avenue ain’t Vanity Fair, and as such, the production budget was very tight, so we decided to shoot everything at Michael’s design studio. The only problem, he just moved in and when I went by to take a look at what we might have to work with, the place was still under construction. Even so, there were a few things that caught my eye…
These mirrors…
A Knoll Egg Chair…
A wall of dress forms…
And something all Canucks have on their walls…a really cool mounted head!
Michael assured me the studio would be completed in time for the shoot, and a few weeks later Kaz and I hauled a thousand pounds of gear uptown and went to work, starting with those mirrors…
Well, that sucked…gotta get that color balance right…
Much better. Let’s do it…
And here’s how it looked in the magazine…
Now…the dress forms…
Way too much ring light and too little drama…gotta bring in the Mini-Octa…
Perfect!
So good, it ended up on the cover…
Michael had a black pony area rug on the floor that I thought would look good from above…
The high angle was great, but the day bed wasn’t working, so we went with the Egg Chair instead…
And as the only horizontal I shot all day, it fit right in as the opener for the story…
Since I had been to the studio on the scout, Michael had added some shelves that showed off his collection of fashion illustrations on either side of the Antelope head. Catherine was going to wear one of his signature Tartan dresses that he designed especially for her, and I originally thought it might look good with a stark ringlight effect…
But it came off like a Terry Richardson rip-of and was too different from everything else we were doing, so I brought back the drama with a spotlight on her…
We had already shot a lot, but Michael had one more gown he wanted to include and although we had pretty much shot every angle of his studio, after wracking our brains for one more idea we thought it might be fun to offset the stunning beaded dress against a haphazard pile of chairs…
Works for me!
After a very long day in a very small studio, we were three very tired Canadians! And the June issue of Avenue magazine is on the stands now!
Damn Ugly Photography 