About

Hello there,

my name is Leth and I am a Toronto-based photographer.

I shoot a bit of everything, but I specialize in journalistic-style event photography– In specific, party/entertainment/music photography. I also enjoy street photography and urban exploring. I shoot in both digital and traditional film methods on a variety of cameras ranging from point and shoot, to rangefinder, to SLR, to medium format, to full digital.

I generally abhor posed, contrived images of people and do my best to capture individuals at their most candid of moments.

I am a big fan of film cameras and film lenses, and much of my available light photography is done with Takumar M42s, Zuiko OMs, and Zeiss C/Ys adapted to fit my digital bodies.

My flash photography, especially that done in nightclubs and concert venues, is almost always done with a multiple strobe setup.

Since I have little content up on this site at the moment, please visit this GALLERY. While the above gallery requires a bit of an update itself, its certainly a good starting point for you to get an idea of what it is that I shoot.

I eventually intend to incorporate galleries into this website, by for now it is a single-image photoblog. Please be patient while I learn how to make changes in order to accompany the content that I require.

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Let me tell you a little bit about me, my photography, and my influences.

I’m an infant of the 80’s, a child of the 90’s, and a student of the millenium.

I’m particularly interested in fine arts, be it through music, drawing, writing, painting, photography, or performance.

I have had a camera in hand ever since I was a small child, spent my elementary school years walking around with instamatics and polaroids.

My first camera was my grandfather’s Rollei 35, a tiny, fully manual viewfinder camera. Its delightfully compact, with a beautifully sharp zeiss tessar lens, but its quirky and difficult to use for beginners. It was not until years later that I learned how to use it, but I always found it to be a thing of beauty– a treasure. I still have it, and it remains in excellent condition and still sees some use every now and then.

I finally learned proper photography right before film’s decline, in the classic fashion: on a Pentax Spotmatic with a 50mm lens.

In junior high school I spent many in-class and at-home hours drawing and writing my own comic series, and I would often spend my time daydreaming and drawing and writing on absolutely everything I owned. I have hundreds of sheets of paper, duotangs, binders, and notebooks full of sketches and doodles.

In high school my interests expanded to performance and writing, and I wrote many short stories and even won awards for my writing, such as 1’st place in the Full Circle Poetry Competition in 2005.

I learned to play many instruments throughout my highschool years, starting with flutes and whistles, progressing to unique ethnic instruments like The Great Highland Bagpipes, the Chinese Erhu, the Tuvian Khomuz, and many others.

Late in highschool I developed a passion for painting, and from there developed an interest in makeup art. I practiced makeup design an apprenticed under a friend who had been doing makeup professionally for years. I bought myself an entire kit and intended on taking up makeup art professionally, but when my entire kit (over $3000’s worth of makeup) was stolen from me, I suffered an incredible defeat and gave up. It was then that I started to re-aquaint myself with photography.

My first digital SLR camera was a Canon Digital Rebel XT, which I purchased through money made through busking on the street, playing various ethnic instruments.

I attended The Ontario College of Art and Design for two years, thinking that I would be able to further develop myself artistically, but eventually dropped out after numerous problems arose from my home life. I was also simply unable to conform to the recently transformed University’s conception of what a “well-rounded artistic education” was.

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My favourite photographers are, in no particular order:  Diane Arbus, Lisette Model, Ansel Adams, Cindy Sherman, David LaChapelle, Annie Leibovitz, Miwa Yanagi, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

I am highly inluenced by journalistic, street, commercial, and high fashion photography, and intend to one day establish myself as a primarily commercial photographer.

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WORK:

I have spent the past three years doing a lot of freelance photography, and have worked for countless promoters, club owners, DJs and have had my work appear in numerous publications. I have also spent the past few years documenting the Toronto rave, club, and underground nightlife scene.

Some of the publications my work has been featured in include:

Xtra!, Eye Weekly, The Eyeopener, Now Magazine, The Excalibur, Toronto Life, et cetera.

This winter, one of the photos featured on this site (Awaiting the Crucifix) will grace the cover of a hardcover book: “Reading Rocky Horror: The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Popular Culture”.

I worked for Eye Weekly in the fall-winter of 2007.

I was the resident photographer of BLAK nightclub for its short-lived run.

I am also the official photographer for Toronto’s only Rocky Horror Picture Show shadow cast: Excitedly Mental State.

I regularly shoot/have shot events at the following nightclubs: The Kathedral/Reverb/Big-Bop, The Funhaus, The Opera House, The Docks/Sound Academy, The Mod Club, The Guverment/Kool Haus, CiRCA, The Social, Wrongbar, Ourspace, and many more.