My shoot was on Wednesday and on the weekend before I got a lovely message from a friend of a friend of mine, whom I met all but once for a coffee! She was on a roll, but needed a good start and asked if I would take her on for a week! This girl is making her way through 8 different jobs in 8 weeks and boy, they could not be more different from each other! Among some of her jobs are photography assisting, making espresso, cutting meat and working in a yoga studio! Crazy! I love her blog and I love my new friend Amanda!

Amanda was a great company and a lot of help! She made a little video of us setting up and she even wrote a poem! Hahaha! The job went great and we celebrated with afternoon tea the very next day!

I must say, I had the best assistants on this job. Amanda and Zak helped me out with the set up and Amanda, Daniel and Paolo were making things happen on the day of the shoot! I love that energy of everyone pitching in to make things happen!

I have done my fair share of assisting and what people often don’t realize is, that all the schlepping and working long days is done out of passion and often, because an assistant is a photographer too!

So this is to all the great assistants out there!

These shots were done as test shots for my job and a couple of them are so much fun, I couldn’t just keep them on my hard drive and not let the world see them! And here is the proof that Amanda is a hair taller than Zak! Hmmhmm!

Yes I do love the Canadian Geographic, but I love the current issue so much more! The hard work, time and effort I put into working on a personal series of photographs capturing the Elvis Tribute Artist culture has paid off by being published in a magazine I have been dreaming about seeing my work in for the last decade!

Thane Dunn performing at the Collingwood Elvis Festival.

But there is more! I really do feel like a little kid in a candy store! Canadian Geographic online has the story and more of my photographs too! And an interview with me and more of my work as a part of their Field Reports!

I am so grateful to all of my Elvis Tribute Artist friends! They let me go beyond their comfort level and I really enjoyed being in their company. Thank you! Thank you very much! LOL!

I had a great help for this. My new friend Stoeps from LA came along to help out. And that was when I found out that he is a cinematographer that makes incredible documentaries and some very cool commercials all over the World! He was the best assistant ever! Holding on to my reflector and holding my cameras. That is something I really love about this profession, we never stop to learn from each other! It’s beautiful. There are no boundaries for creativity!

But back to the photography. Earlier the same week I was cooking a dinner and when I opened up my freezer I was frustrated with how much space in it is taken up by rolls of film, that have been sitting there for years! So, when I was packing my equipment for the trip to Highpark, I packed a few rolls of film and a couple of my film cameras. Can you guess which images were shot on film?

I had my 5D Cannon SLR, that is a given! I love it! It’s a beautiful camera and does an amazing job! I also brought a little Russian camera my dad gave me a couple of years ago. It’s called “Ljubitel” which means lover in English. I guess the idea was that it was made for the lovers of photography. It is sort of a replica of rolleiflex, you can see it in this shot here.It leaks light all over the place and is nearly impossible to focus! The delightful sunshine on the gorgeous Spring day when cherry trees are in blossom wasn’t helping with that problem either! It’s a toy. And I love my toys! I also brought my Mamiya 645 Pro. That camera had not been used in about 5 years! I pulled a roll of film out of it with images from a trip to a friend’s cottage from 5 years ago! Wow! Considering how long it took me to save up the money for it and then I had the guy in the camera store hold it for me for another 6 months until I had enough money to pick it up, it is really sad that it doesn’t get any use anymore. It’s a camera like that that makes you feel like a real photographer. Big and heavy in your hand, with a massive viewfinder and the little split screen to focus with! Ah! How could I have forgotten how much I loved it! So I shot a roll with it and some of the shots from the roll are in the series, but I am not telling you which ones! Not just yet!

I love the element of surprise that comes along with shooting film. Not so much for work, but for creatives like this, it’s delightful! I played around and the shot above for example was taken with my little Russian Ljubitel camera. I exposed the same piece of film multiple times and as often happens, the best stuff gets cut, perforated and ruined by the lab in processing. It’s not a mistake either! It’s bound to happen. They have to perforate the film in order to be able to dip it into all the chemicals processing involves and this image happened to be at that very end of the roll. Somehow, I think this was the perfect effect for this image and I couldn’t have hoped for a crazier and better result!

There are more shots from this series on my websites homepage. Can you guess which ones were shot on film versus digital?