Introduction

Jessica, I looked at the images you've provided and have a few ideas to bounce back at you.

The feeling I get from your reference images is that for your site, you’re looking to capture a mix of approachability and active lifestyle, with a subtle highlight of your unique character.

The website template you’re looking at favours landscape-oriented (horizontal) photos over portrait-oriented ones (vertical). The mix in the Squarespace demo site is 10 vertical photos and 21 horizontal photos. That’s actually fairly normal - computer screens are themselves horizontal and give that extra “oompf!” to horizontal photos on websites. The one time when you’d get a better view of vertical shots is when the site is viewed on mobile devices.

I only point this to keep this in mind as we select what to shoot and where. There are no hard and fast rules that can’t be broken when it comes to visual compositions - I just think you don’t want to end up with 10 photos that are all either vertical or horizontal.

Tone

A good way to describe the tone we could go for is to say that the camera merely catches you in middle of going about your day - a snapshot of a moment in time. We would try to make the viewer wish they could join you on your errands for a brief moment.

In other words, a mix of approachable and friendly, but a little bit towards the serious side. Not so much the “let’s sit down and discuss the repercussions of genocide” kind of serious, but rather “I’m dedicated to what I’m passionate about” kind of serious. Approachable in the sense that if people saw you on the street, they’d feel like they could ask you a question.

For example, these people look approachable:

while these ones look much less so:

Look

From the examples you’ve provided, a lot of them seem very natural in their look, by which I mean the “opposite of highly stylized”. These feel very natural to me:

while these give the viewer a feeling of being very stylized:

Given that you’re interested getting shots of running and street athletes, it feels appropriate to stress some attention on getting dynamic compositions. We could discuss using natural light or artificial light, but fundamentally it’s all about capturing that dynamism. Perhaps we could use some low-angles and high-angles to help us capture that.

I really like these:

And perhaps we could also get some high-angle shots like this:

As for the “simple yoga shot”, we could do something like this mediation pose:

somewhere either iconic, like this location with the skyline of Toronto in the background:

or somewhere less specific and peaceful, such as this:

For the portrait of yourself, we could get that done at the same locations where we get you running, but before you do any running and work-up a sweat.

Here are a few example of my headshots:

Wardrobe

It’s very much up to you. I would presume it would be a mix of form-fitting athletic clothing for the running and yoga compositions and something more casual for the tattoo and headshot photos. Perhaps a neat idea to try is to have business-y attire for the tattoo macro shot - could be a nice, unique juxtaposition. Another good idea is to vary the athletic wardrobe - bring form-fitting pants as well as running shorts, and different-coloured tops. That way we could change clothing between locations to add production value to the final set of images.

Wardrobe could go in my car. One thing to note is where the car is going to be parked needs to be close to where we shoot. I can’t bring the car to Centre Island, for example :)

Makeup

I think from the look and feel you’re going for, there’s no need for excessive or noticeable makeup. All that would be necessary is a bit of powder to reduce skin shine/glare, that’s all. And that doesn’t require a makeup artist.

And for stuff like this:

we can figure something out and just do it ourselves. Perhaps shoot it at the end of the day, so that the makeup doesn’t appear in the rest of the photos from the day. Or you could put it on at home in the morning and we shoot it as the very first thing, then wipe it off.

Locations

Something we’d need to discuss and settle upon. Perhaps places like The Harbourfront, Woodbine Beach boardwalk / Sunnyside Beach boardwalk, Polson Pier, Centre Island would be useful and practical locations to steer towards and could give a variety of landscapes without doing too much travel across the city. Also, it would need to be on a sunny day.

Cost

The basic package deal would be $500 for 1 full day of shooting and 10 processed images that you get out of it. We would shoot a minimum of 150-200 photos, from which you would get to pick 10 and I'll get them processed. That’s all included in the package price.

If you'd like to shoot some short 5-15 second videos of yourself running - stuff you could loop on your site or use in social media (e.g. Instagram) - we could do that as well. In that case, substitute 1 video for 1 processed photo in your package of 10 processed images. The video would be 1920 by 1080 pixels in whichever format you'd prefer. Generally .mp4 or .mov (in h.264 codec) works well on the web.

If we shoot for 1 day and from the photos we shot you decide you'd like to get more of them processed, each additional photo or short video after the first 10 would be $25/each.

If we decide that the amount of locations we want to hit and the number of outfits to try would require 2 days to shoot, to second day would be an additional $200. This exists so we don’t try to squeeze in an unfeasible number of locations in a single day, but if we really want shoot in a bunch of places, we have that option available.

Generally, to do a single location move from Place A to Place B would kill 90-120 minutes of shooting time. It is in the best interest to find either one location that will give us everything we want, or two that are nearby. Shooting at Sunnyside Beach and then going to Woodbine Beach would take up nearly 2 hours to pack up, drive over (hit traffic), park, change and setup.

Having said that, once we agree on and lock down we want to shoot within the 1 day and if some unforeseen external factor messes up our schedule on the day of the shoot - that’s covered by the cost of the package. In that case we'd pick up what we planned to have shot but couldn’t and find a time that’s suitable to both and finish the shoot then. The timing of it would be something we agree upon if that happens.

The final aspect is the cost of an assistant. Depending on where we shoot and what compositions we’d be going for, we might need an extra set of hands - holding things, keeping an eye on stuff, running to the car, adding money to the parking mere, etc. I can get someone to do that for $100/day. But if you have a friend who’s willing to come out and be a helper, that’s the cost we wouldn’t need to endure.

The payment plan would be: 50% upfront as a non-refundable deposit, once we agree that we'd like to work together and what we'd be shooting and 50% on delivery of processed visuals. Method: cash, cheque or Interac e-transfers. You'd get a receipt and there will not be any HST charged on this.