Richelle Kingsland - Influencer Portraits

Earlier this year I doubled down on some my favourite things to do - collaborating with new creatives (looking at you, Richelle Kingsland), and shooting in a special location - my friends’ beautiful French bistro in Morriston, ON - Bistro Reunion. If you’ve never been, I suggest you make plans to go. The restaurant design is absolutely breathtaking and not surprisingly, the food is insanely good. If you’ve ever been to La Parisienne in Oakville or Verlan in Hamilton you should have a pretty good idea as all three restaurants are owned and run by the same amazing people - Mike and Courtney Colas.

Before we dove into the portrait portion of the day, we had to set up the table with some featured cocktails and key ingridiants used across the menu.

For this shoot, I was looking to build on Canadian content creator Richelle Kingsland’s existing style, as well as add my own flare to the images. Vintage, nostalgic, romantic, and empowering are some of the keywords leading the creative direction for this production. Bistro Reunion’s aesthetic was such a natural environment for this shoot, and was everything I could’ve hoped for in terms of location. The downstairs area (red sofa below) has to be my favourite vibe of the day if I’m honest. So much character and Richelle fit right in there.

For setup, we kept things simple and efficient by using LED lights and large diffusion. That approach is hard to beat on condensed shoot days with small crews and lots to acheive. There was another thing that made for the real secret sauce but I’ll let you guess what that was. Let me know in the comments!

To emphasize the vintage aesthetic and looks, I shot some of these sets with my Leica M10 and and 1969 Summilux 50mm v2.

Bonjour,

Shlomi