This is one of my most popular published and awarded shots and here is some of the details of the making of this shot!
It was shot in the basement of a empty apartment building my friend was watching over. After we made all the necessary arrangements to be able to do the shoot there, I started developing the idea more. I was very fortunate to be able to work with Pandora Makeup Artistry and Toronto model Candi Davis for the shoot. The idea was to build a set where the girl would be knee high in water, interestingly that would not be able to be done in the way i thought unless we made a small "pool". Since this was not an option I had to rethink how to do the shoot, I decided to go with a smaller dimension for the wood framing and then lined it with clear plastic. A new problem arose as we were building, I did not want the cement floor showing, so then we decided to add garage bags under the clear plastic, which created another new problem, it was very slippery... Once we had it built, we added the water and a chair that would be used for Candi to sit on. The furniture and other items in the background were items left behind from former tenants, so I dragged them into place and the "stage" was set... Pandora MUA made the heart from clay which turned out awesome. On the day of the shoot we had Candi come in and dressed her in the pink dress I picked up from a local clothing store. We carefully guided Candi to the chair and poured the blood on her and gave her the roses, she was amazing, she sat in the chair with the cold water for several hours as we tried several angles and ideas. This is the shot I settled on in the end to do the full edit on. Her expression truly captures the mood of what i was hoping to create in this shot. Prints are available...