Holiday Gift Guide Cadeau

With the holidays right around the corner, there is certainly last minute gift shopping taking place in full frenzy in the shops and online.
In case you haven't sorted out all your pressies for your family and your besties may I point you towards the 2014 holiday gift guides from ELLE Canada and ELLE Québec that I had loads of fun/stress-filled pleasure to research, edit and style.

As you can see it's a bit of same/same but different-spot the differences if you feel so intrepid.
While I love all the pages, I have a soft spot for the all black/all white mood shot, with a particular jonesing for those matte black ester & erik candles...just in case you were curious.

Joyeuses fêtes!

Tour de Bloc - New Kid on the Bloc

climber: Karine Gervais

In November Bloc Shop hosted a competition in the 12th season of Tour de Bloc's Canadian bouldering series' eastern division.  Yours truly was asked to capture the very photogenic sport-for my first time ever.  Taking up the task, I contacted seasoned climbing photographer François Lebeau for some sensei-like advice.  Over omelettes at Brooklyn Label Lebeau and I discussed lighting situations, shooting etiquettes and PocketWizards, filling my head with trepidation and antici...pation. 

 climber L: Florent Balsez R: Eveline Lapierre

climber: Sue Brumm

 climber: Marc-Antoine Vigneault

 climber: Clarrie Lam

climber: Ayo Sopeju

climber: Florent Balsez

While I had a couple of technical difficulties, I am pleased to say that I got a chalk-covered handful of images I was happy with. Whoo! Check out the whole series on Bloc Shop's Facebook page.

press days - SS15

A dear friend's four-year-old child came up with the wonderful term of "goose-boobs." It's meaning is when you have goose bumps, goose flesh or cutis anserina (if you want to get all technical) on your breasts.  And as the temperature drops, I am definitely suffering of goose-boobs.

I've been doing the rounds of showrooms and reconnecting face-to-face with the lovely PR and marketing gurus around town for spring/summer15 collections and yearning already for summer-or spring! Why don't we just skip winter for one year?

The above image (right) was taken during a cozy presentation by the Michael Kors team.  Somehow the flowers are the only image that survived a hasty phone clean-up.  Fortunately that black calf Bradshaw sandal from the SS15 lookbook is giving me something to look forward to as my toes will remain bundled until at least April.

artUnion-Spotlight on the Arts14

It started at the QPAT in 2013, a first-time outing in a collaborative art project that began its life centred around themes with a difficult-to-conceive on the spot drawing component.  One year later artUnion decided to submit a proposal for this year's teachers conference, with a significant change to the focus.  A shift was made from thematic images to biographical, where the students carried out the research for their assigned figure of historical or current importance.
Holy moly, what a difference it made!
We (a group of artists) were so pleased to facilitate this project and look forward to bringing it to schools in the upcoming new year. Art Ed! Whoo!