Happy Monday!

Happy Monday! What a beautiful city we live in!

Happy Monday!

Little Visitors

I had a couple of little visitors come by the studio this week to distract me from my work. Luckily they are pretty cute and allowed me to take a few photos! Notice L'il K's T&T shirt picked up by Auntie when I photographed Andrea + Ravi's wedding there in August. And yes, it was purely by chance that these two had practically matching outfits!

Happy Friday!

Here is L'il K practising her serious and happy faces!

Katerra went in for a kiss and it looks like it took Rémi by surprise!

Another Year

Another year older. I think that birthdays are a good time to reflect over the past year of one's life. New Years is also a good time for that but on your birthday, it is more special as it is yours. This past year has been top notch and I can hardly believe all of the things that I have done. I have had so many fabulous photography shoots that have jammed my portfolio full - from the awesome weddings to the lovely ladies who I had boudoir sessions with, it has been amazing. Every time I finish a session with someone I feel honoured that they chosen me to be the one to capture their lives for them. It is a really special job that I have.

This past year was also a huge one of travel for me. I saw the red rock and casinos of Las Vegas. I visited my sister Emily in Mexico City and we even managed to fly to the east coast to Veracruz for a few days. Then it was eighteen glorious days traveling around Europe: first stop Monza, Italy then pretty England and finally Florina & Kratero, Greece. My last big trip was, of course, to photograph Andrea + Ravi's wedding in Trinidad. In the last year I have swam in the Gulf of Mexico, Prespa Lake (which borders Macedonia, Albania & Greece), the Caribbean Sea and Sand Lake, Ontario. It has been an incredible time of exploring. Every time I was in a new place, I had to seriously consider if what I was seeing was real or if it all was just a dream.

This year has been great. There have been lots of changes in my life and there will continue to be. But what fun is life if you do not switch things up now and again?! This coming year I have some goals that I am determined to reach and have many new images that I am just itching to create! I am excited to see what the next months hold for me. Thank you everyone for being a part of my life over the past year, you have all made it so special. Life is great. Cherish every moment of it.

Happy Birthday, sister!

Some of you may know my sister Abby as my assistant extraordinaire at weddings. When we show up to photograph a wedding and someone asks if we are sisters it always makes me think of this clip from A Night at the Roxbury. She is such a blast to work with and I am thankful to have her not only as an assistant but as an amazing sister as well! She is an incredible mother to my niece and even though she's my baby sister, I totally look up to her (in all respects!) Happy Birthday, Abs! Love you!

The Abby you may know.

The Abby I know!

Happy Tuesday!

I hope that everyone had a fabulous long weekend and managed to enjoy some of the last rays of summer sunshine! I spent it up North for a very Canadian weekend of afternoons swimming in lakes and evenings of bonfires. It is hard to get back to the reality of the city but here I am! Look out for a ton of new photos being posted in the next couple of weeks!

L'il K at the Zoo!

I have been so busy this summer that I have really been missing out on good L'il K time. I was missing my little niece so much that I decided to take Wednesday off of all things work-related and take her to the zoo!

Last summer when we went, she was too young to understand what was going on and was actually afraid of a lot of the fish and animals. This year she loved it! Her favourite animals were definitely the monkeys and tigers. She also loved the fish but wanted to eat them! I was nervous at first with taking her because the first time I took her out on my own, I failed at "Crash Test Mommy" by losing my wallet within a half hour! Managing a two year old and everything else is quite the task so I could not take too many photos. This girl kills me and I can hardly believe how fast she is growing up! She officially calls me Auntie Jess which just melts my heart. Here are some of my favourite images from the day.

This is her mimicking a hanging monkey!

Catching Up

I am slowly getting caught up on my work after being away for a week. I cannot wait to start posting photos from Andrea + Ravi's awesome Trinidad wedding!

While you patiently wait, here is a lovely image from one of the most beautiful places on earth - Tobago. After the weddings, I enjoyed four glorious days on this island swimming with the fishes, eating delicious foods and gaining many new freckles.

Greece Train Holgas

A three hour train ride to places unknown. The sunset and it was dark by the time we arrived.

Italian Wedding

The purpose of our trip to Monza, Italy was to attend Sarah + Alessandro's wedding. I was very excited to attend a wedding without working it - this meant that I could actually wear a dress and heels! Their wedding was stunning - all of the guests were picked up in a coach and driven out of town to a gorgeous villa for the festivities. The Prosecco and Grappa flowed all night and I cannot even count the number of courses that we had to eat. Since I was not the official photographer for the evening, I did not bring my big camera to the wedding. However, I could not help but bring along my Fuji point and shoot to capture the event!

Here's a photo of us at the villa.

I love Ontario!

When you live in Ontario, nothing beats spending a weekend in Muskoka. It is so beautiful up there!

Happy Monday!

Happy Monday!

Since my wedding this past weekend was on Sunday, I decided to steal my niece and head to my Mom's house out in the country. Li'l K is just under two years old so it was her first sleepover without her Mom. I, initially, failed at "Crash Test Mommy" as in the first half hour of having Li'l K on my own, I managed to lose my wallet! Besides the rough start, we had a lot of fun. Saturday afternoon she didn't want to nap on her own so I set her up on the couch in the living room and she immediately crashed out. I love this little lady so much!

Stayed tuned for photos from Anastasia + Bill's fabulous wedding that took place yesterday! I can hardly wait to process them!

My Photo Exhibit - Mexican Holgas

I currently have an exhibit of my work at the Queen Mother Cafe at 208 Queen Street West in Toronto. This show is of my Mexican Holgas and it has been two years in the making! If you are ever in that neighbourhood, please stop by the Queen Mother and tell me what you think!

An excerpt from the description of the exhibit:
Mexican Holgas is a project that Jessica has been working on for the past two years. Her frequent visits to Mexico have enabled her to travel from coast to coast of the country always with her Holga camera in tow. The Holga camera enables her to create images that give the viewer a sense of nostalgia and familiarity to the places in them.

Long Weekend

This past weekend was a long one for us Canadians in honour of Queen Victoria's birthday. On Saturday I photographed Arielle & Noah's B'Nai Mitzvah. Sunday we headed out of town to my Mom's place near Brighton for a mini break from the city. As tradition goes, the May long weekend is always cold and wet. This year, Mother Nature held her usual ground - although the moody skies did make for great photos!

Palm Tree Holgas

Happy Monday!

Mexican Holgas :: March 2008

I had such a blast in Mexico touring around with my sister who lives in Mexico City. We traveled around the City, Metepec in the State of Mexico and beautiful Veracruz.

Mexican Holgas [sneak peek]

I am very excited about my Holga results from Mexico. Here is a sneak peek of the first one that caught my eye.

Ashes and Snow

On Sunday I saw the best photography exhibition that I have ever seen. When I first arrived in Mexico two weeks ago, my sister had told me that there was an exhibition in the Zocalo in Mexico City. She did not know much about it, other then that it was a Canadian photographer and that when the exhibit opened, people were waiting in line for three to four hours to see it. On my last day in Mexcio, we decided to head down to see what it was all about. As we traveled down to the heart of the City, via Paseo de la Reforma, an advertisement on a bus caught our eye. It was of an elephant crouching down and a boy sat in front of him reading. I then realized that this was the exhibit that we were about to see.

We waited in line with hundreds of others for an hour before gaining entry and what I saw brought tears to my eyes. It was so incredibly beautiful and powerful.

Ashes and Snow is an installation by Gregory Colbert. It is displayed in a Nomadic Museum that is built specifically for the city that it is in. The structure housing the installation was amazing with it's bamboo columns and marvelous height.

The largescale photographs hovered over still water forcing you to stop and really see them, so as to understand what you were looking at.

The films brought a peaceful silence to the hundreds of people watching.

I have never experienced anything like it before and the whole time I kept thinking of how Gregory Colbert must feel for accomplishing something so fantastic.

All of the photographs are completely natural - nothing is digitally enhanced and none of the images are stills from the films. It is truly unbelievable. If any of you are looking for a weekend away, I highly suggest hopping on a plane and heading to Mexico City to see the exhibit before it is gone (April 27th!). If you are not able to head there, please keep your eyes open for the next city that it will travel to and definitely check out the Ashes and Snow website.

My Favourite Little Lady

Li'l K is almost twenty months old and she is so much fun to hang out with! She is saying words now, including calling her Mom by her first name! She colours and glues and tries to help out with things as best as she can. She also knows how to get her way with a single bat of her eyelashes!

I love the profile of her cute little nose!

This is Li'l K with her back purposefully to the camera. She had to peek to make sure that I was still trying to take photos of her!

Anyone who knows my sisters and myself knows that we love to laugh. We laugh so hard that tears stream down our cheeks. I'm happy to announce that Li'l is exactly like us. She just found it hilarious to destroy the Lego house that I had built for her. Here is a clip of that adorable laugh.

Las Vegas Holgas

Oh Winter

As the winter drags on here, it is sometimes hard to remember to take a moment to see the beauty in all of it. We are so busy scrambling around in the cold with hunched shoulders, traveling from our homes to cars to work ,that we rarely take a moment to look around us. This past weekend we visited my dear friends, Wendy + Adam in Fort Erie. We took a walk around the waterfront there and I was amazed by the ice that was built up on the river. On the drive back to Toronto, we just had to stop at Niagara Falls!

Ontario Holgas

Anyone who knows me well knows that the Holga is my camera. I absolutely love to shoot with it, especially in my personal work. Every road trip or vacation that I take, my Holga comes along. I recently got eight rolls of film developed that I had shot on this camera. Some of the film was from the summer so I was excited to see what would come from it! Here are some of my favourites from various trips in the past seven months across Ontario.

Near Grand Bend

Near Grand Bend


Near Terra Cotta


The Badlands


Ferris Provincial Park


Southampton

The Hoover Dam

While recently in Las Vegas we took a little trip over to see the Hoover Dam. It was incredible to see and I had no idea how massive it was. The sun was starting to drop which made it perfect for photography.

Valley of Fire, Nevada

Obviously I love photographing people. I could go on talking about how much I love it. About how satisfying it is when you know that you have captured that one frame that truly emanates the moment that just occurred between the people in the photograph. I truly love it.

In my free time, however, I love photographing places. Particularly barren ones. This past weekend while I was in Las Vegas, we rented a car and headed out of the city to discover some new lands. We came across the Valley of Fire and I fell in love with the landscapes there. It was so beautiful.

And one last one of us.

I'm ba-ack!

I have returned from my weekend away in the wild and fabulous Las Vegas. Stay tuned for some images from the trip! In the meantime, here I am at the Valley of Fire.

Happy Monday!

Mondays are always hard, especially in the winter! To make up for the cold weather and snow piling up, we have been getting some spectacular sunsets. Here is the view from my studio last week. Toronto has never looked better!

This Weekend in Toronto

Yes, it is cold, snowy and seriously windy today in Toronto. City TV is dubbing it a "Godzilla"-like storm and it is supposed to be the worst storm of the season. But we are Canadians and we can handle a little snow, right?! This weekend is a great time to celebrate the season as it is the last one of WinterCity 2008. Last weekend we ventured in the cold down to Nathan Philip's Square to take in the Nights of Fire exhibit and to hear some tunes by locals Tokyo Police Club. I am so glad that we did! The fire exhibit put on by France's Cie Carabosse is awesome! The entire square is surrounded by fire and they have different structures lit with fire throughout. The fires will be lit again tonight and tomorrow from 6pm until 9pm so please check it out if you get a chance - it is definitely worth battling the snow for! Tomorrow night another great Canadian band, the Weakerthans, also hit the stage.

Fine Art!

I have been asked by a number of people if I am ever going to sell any of my fine art images so I thought that I should get rolling on making that possible!

I am currently working on a project of my Mexican Holgas and am going to continue shooting this project when I visit Mexico in March. In the meantime, I have made a little website with some of my favourite personal images that I have taken over the past couple of months. I plan to continuously update this website as I shoot new images so keep checking it and please do not hesitate to contact me if you fancy any of them!

New Year's Day

It was such a nice sight to wake up to a New Year yesterday morning with the perfect amount of snow draping the roofs and tree branches. A walk outside was a must so we headed to one of my favourite places in Toronto - Cherry Beach.

Personal Photos

There have been a lot of postings on this blog about half-naked woman lately but I wanted to assure you that I have been photographing other things as well! Here is a couple of photos of Little K getting ready for bed last night. I think that her hair looks a little "flock of seagull"-like in these.


We have been having some amazing sunsets lately and the view from the studio is incredible! Here is an image of one from last week.

Important Ladies

The Badlands

There as so many amazing places in Ontario. A couple of weekends ago I was shown this gem of a place and instantly fell in love with it. The land is just incredible!

Thanksgiving Weekend

Ontario is such an amazing province, especially in the autumn. The landscape is so beautiful and it is incredible how much it can vary. On Thanksgiving weekend we went to my Mom's fabulous house which is just north of Brighton. We later drove West to Guelph, taking highway 2 as far as we could.

Back!

I have returned from a lovely long weekend touring around the province. New postings coming soon!

She is a kid!

I cannot believe how big my niece Katerra is getting. She is such a kid! She runs all over the place now. Last weekend she pointed at me and said, "Aunt". I am not kidding! She even has her own Cabbage Patch Kid that she pushes around in her kid-sized stroller.

Abby and Katerra are such buddies!