Point Pleasant Battery (Halifax, Nova Scotia)

On the first sunny day after endless drizzle and rain (or so it seemed to me) I set off to Point Pleasant Park to spend the day roaming and focusing very tightly on the coast battery at the very western edge of the park.

6x7 cm film

Probably the hardest part of working at Point Pleasant is keeping the people out of the images - several images took many minutes to create, simple because of having to wait for people to move out of the frame. For the past 18 months or so, I've focused almost exclusively on the Nude, a generally spectator-free pursuit. Working in a public park with the view camera often attracts an audience (many of whom ask how old the "antique" camera is). For the final image here, a young boy watched from the window in the middle of the image with great interest as I set up the camera but showed no inclination toward moving out of the image when I was ready to go. Eventually, the withering gaze of three waiting photographers got the better of him and he fled the scene.

4"x5" film

The pleasure of working with an engaging subject, at a leisurely pace, cannot be exaggerated With the Nude, there is always the model's time-frame to consider, but with architecture, I can take all the time I wish, waiting for the right light, for people to move, or for the clouds to move into position or out of frame..

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On the whole, the day spent working with the ruins at Point Pleasant was thoroughly enjoyable. True to form, in the four hours I spent working, I probably moved less than 200 meters from where I started - the joy of working with patient, static subjects was refreshing and novel; I have been too long away from the forts.

Portraits of Carol (Halifax, Nova Scotia)

The evening following the session with Jennifer found me back in the studio, this time to make portraits of a close friend, Carol, who is also a photographer. Carol and I have been discussing the assorted issues surrounding my work for some time, and recently, she'd suggested modelling for portraits as a way of getting a better sense of how I work.

4"x5" film

The biggest difference between the afternoon and evening session was how much easier it was to work with studio flash at night, when the studio is absolutely dark. Whereas during the previous day's session with Jennifer I chose to abandon flash in favour of available light, in the evening, I was easily able to see exactly how the image was being lit by the strobes, and adjust the lighting accordingly.

Focusing just on portraiture (as I did with Staci two weeks before) again grew into a challenge, and the process was almost a mirror of the session with Staci. We began with conventional portraits, and got exactly what I expected, conservative, traditional images. Wanting to shake the session up, I shifted to a much less traditional mode, asking Carol to lie back on a chair, with her head arched back towards the camera. As soon as I saw the results on my camera's ground-glass, I knew this was what I wanted.

4"x5" film

The best images from the session were variations of the head-back images; one direct on, taking advantage of the narrow depth of field of the view camera to throw all but the eye-lashes out of focus, and the other playing on the flow of Carol's hair, and using an angular composition to increase the tension within the image. On the whole, I am much more pleased with the work that I had expected - portraiture normally does not inspire me, but with this work, I am very enthusiastic about the results.

Jennifer's First Session (Halifax, Nova Scotia)

There is always the risk at the initial setting with a new model that the first set of images will be a write-off, marred perhaps by the nervousness of the model or simply by the desire of both the model and I to get through the "adjusting to modeling" stage and get on with the work. With this session, however, there are successes in the images made in the first ten minutes. My favourite, to the right. is not technically a nude, but I doubt the image could have been made clothed - the delicacy and openness of the photo would have been less apparent without the vulnerability that the hidden nudity lends to the pose.

35mm infrared film

Working with a person new to modeling is always a challenge - it usually takes some time to develop a rapport, and often a first session is just the initial step towards a solid working relationship. Until a session is actually underway, it is really hard to tell if the model is as strong as I'd hoped, or will need some time to reach their full potential. In this case, I knew within the first fifteen minutes of the session that all I had hoped for with Jennifer, and more, could be achieved.

35mm transparency film

I had initially approached Jennifer about modeling in late March, but it wasn't until five weeks later that she had enough time to spare to work with me. Because the weather here is still poor, we arranged a time for the studio, and set to work. Jennifer had never modeled nude before, but quickly became comfortable, working well before the camera and displaying little evidence of nervousness or trepidation.

After working with the studio strobes for an hour or so, I switched to available light, using a window diffused by white sheers. While studio flash is much brighter than diffused window light, the large, even illumination of the covered window is hard to beat, and provides me with much more inspiration than the far more controllable studio flash.

4"x5" film

My favourite image of the session, above, was another of those "hold that pose, don't move" moments. Jennifer had been waiting for me to set something up, and had stretched her arm - at that moment I glanced and saw the light on her face, and her fingers flowing towards her breasts, and I knew the image had to be made. The exposure was made at a very wide aperture, f/8 on an f/5.6 lens, at 1/4 of a second, but is tack sharp, to the point that the room behind me is visible, reflected in her eyes. There is literally nothing I would do to change this image - it is exceeds everything I saw at the moment of creation.

As is often the case with new models, the images that Jennifer and I made during her first session focused predominantly upon her face - her personality providing a focus for a session with no real goals, beyond my beginning a relationship with a new model.

Portraits of Staci (Halifax, Novaa Scotia)

4"x5" film

Staci works in the lab in the photo store where I work half-time and changes her hair-styles more often than most parents change their minds. Usually these hair-changes are subtle, one day the colour might be blue, the next green, but when she came into work sporting a Mohawk, I knew it had to be memorialized. I normally do little portrait work, but the possibilities of the new hair-cut was too enticing to pass up (not to mention the knowledge that the Mohawk might be gone in a day or a week).

4"x5" film

We began the session with pretty traditional images, which worked fine from a photographic perspective, but failed utterly to capture what I wanted to convey. Once we added Staci's skateboard to the session however, it all came together. Where before I was trying to fit something non-traditional into a traditional format, with only moderate success, once I added something more of Staci's world to the image, it all came together.

4"x5" film

A Pregnancy Session (Halifax, Nova Scotia)

During the previous week's session Victoria mentioned a friend of hers was pregnant and might like having her photos done before she came to term. After a small flurry of e-mails and phone calls, a date was set, and both Nancy and I crossed our fingers that the day would arrive before the baby.

35mm infrared original

Luck was with us, and Nancy arrived at the studio still pregnant (she was due four days later, and ended up having a baby boy, Lee, six days after our session). After setting up the lights, we started to work,. I borrowed a friend's Mamiya RZ for the session, as it is a much faster camera to work with than a view camera but still gave a very high quality image. The decision turned out to be a good one, as it permitted me to make a large number of images in a relatively short session. 

6x7 film

As the motivation for the session was Nancy's pregnancy, this was the obvious focal point for the images, with us working around the interplay of light and shadow on the belly. The motion of Nancy's strong hands massaging her baby fascinated me and fully half of the images are of her hands moving across her belly, a wonderful depiction of the relationship between the mother and unborn child.

My favourite image of the session came as a surprise. Before I started working, in discussing the session with several friends, they all agreed that the one image to be avoided was a frontal image of the belly - we all thought that it would look too distended. At the close of the session however, I tried a few images of Nancy's belly directly on, filling the frame with the swell of the pregnancy, and in my favourite image, Nancy's hands, encompassing the baby. Framed by the breasts above, and the legs below, it makes for a wonderfully tender image of Nancy and her unborn son.

6x7 film

For the first part of the session, I used a white backdrop, which turned out to be totally inappropriate - the body against it looked too dark, and of all those images, not a single one gave me the results I was looking for. Once I shifted to black, however, things came together, and the same poses that had failed with the white now worked wonderfully, with the dark shadows and rim lighting defining the figure wonderfully.

Victoria Returns to the Studio (Halifaax, Nova Scotia)

There seems to be a decided lack of interest on my part in working with studio lighting this winter. Where last winter I worked extensively with the studio, this year, both times I have used the studio to date, I began the session using the natural light that comes in through the window normally located behind the backdrops. As powerful and flexible as studio lights are, I by far prefer reacting to what natural light reveals.

35mm transparency film

We started working with the mirror in colour, building on the work from the first session of the year. I used the much slower Fuji Astia film this time, which gave me a very narrow depth of field. This made the work reminiscent of both the defocused studio images and Thalamus work from 1999. We finished using the window light with Victoria working on a white sheet on the floor, reveling in the descriptive quality of the diffused light.

4"x5" film

The only images we did using the studio flash were a series of portraits; while we've made some strong portraits together outdoors, I still feel I have not made the quintessential "Victoria" studio portrait. With this in mind, I switched over to the studio 4"x5" (as opposed to mine, which could not support the heavy 360mm lens I wished to use) and proceeded to focus on portraiture - with nudity present, but not the focus of the work. The results were pleasing, with three or four interesting images, my favourite of which is to the right. In some ways, portraiture is far harder than figure work, in that it is important to portray something of the model as well as the photographer in the image.

35mm transparency film

After looking at the dancing images from the previous session, both Victoria and I agreed that while they were successful, they were only a beginning of what could be done. While most photographers focus on the strength and power of a dancer's body, we both felt it was the grace and movement which made the dance so powerful, so we decided to begin an experiment with motion blur and dance. At the close of this session, I turned off the flash-pack, and lit the studio with just the modeling lights - providing just enough light for a 2 second exposure. We produced 16 images of Victoria dancing, exposing the film for two seconds during the peak of the motion. The biggest lesson of the session was that two seconds is a REALLY long time to dance slowly; most of the images are almost pure white, as the dance moves were carried out too quickly, and only Victoria's torso and legs were recorded on the film.

6x7 transparency film

All that said, a number of the images met my expectations, with my favourite being on the left. The soft, delicate tones of the image is exactly what I was hoping for, and the motion, which led to just a hint of her torso and hair, giving me a sense of mystery to the image.

Orono in the Snow (Orono, Maine)

I find it highly ironic that I had to travel south in the middle of winter to find snow, but as Nova Scotia is swiftly becoming the tropics of the North, it is true. While the winters in Nova Scotia can be bitterly cold, we frequently miss most of the snow.

6x9 cm transparency film

Though the trip to Maine was for other reasons, I did take advantage of the new surroundings to put a Fuji GSWIII 6x9 rangefinder through its paces. I plan to use this camera in a number of roles in my work, and though I've had it since the end of 1999, this was my first opportunity to use it outdoors. The camera has 65mm f5.6 lens on it (equal to a 28mm lens on a 35mm camera), and takes 8 images on a roll of 120 film. I plan to use the camera for Konica 120 Infrared film and colour transparencies.

6x9 cm transparency film

Working with the camera was a pleasure - the viewfinder is bright and accurate, and the controls well laid out. The film I used, Fuji Provia F, was wonderful too, providing rich vivid colours and very clean tones, even for the snow.

Victoria in the Studio (Halifax, Nova Scotia)

35mm transparency

My first session of the new year saw me revisiting mirror and dance images, this time with Victoria as the model. Where all the other mirror images were made using a black background, and studio flash, these images were created with natural light. I used a large white sheet to diffuse the window light, which in turn gave a wonderfully soft quality to the light on Victoria's body.

35mm infrared film

Where the earlier mirror images had a weightiness to them rooted in the dark shadows and empty backgrounds; the white background makes a huge difference to the reading of the final images, with these being lighter and celebratory in feel. The day we made these photos was overcast and grey, forcing me to use a faster transparency film than I would have liked, but the results were encouraging, and I will certainly continue to explore the possibilities of combining the mirror with the white background.

35mm infrared film

From the natural light images, we moved to working with studio flash, using it to stop the motion of dance. These images originate in the dance work I did with Cheryl in January 1999 but where for her the dance was a method of approach to modeling nude for the first time, with Victoria, it was the meeting of her art with mine. As a dancer, and dance teacher, Victoria spends many hours a week dancing, but this was the first time I really tried to incorporate her dancing with my work. In 1999, we did use some dance poses outdoors but those were static poses; this session had Victoria dancing to Yo-Yo Ma's tango music, and me trying to freeze the motion at the ideal points.

35mm infrared film

Most of my work has little of the model in it; the images are obviously filtered through the model's body, but in this case, these images are more about Victoria, than about my personal vision. Both of us are pleased with the results, but I feel more could be done, and we plan to work with her dancing again..

A final Session for 1999 (Halifax, Nova Scotia)

35mm transparency film

My last session of 1999 was by far the most successful of the natural light sessions I did with Joe and Billie. Unlike the first session in the front room two days earlier, the sun was shining, and the light was perfect. This permitted me to use the slower speed Astia film, which is by far my favorite for skin-tones. It can not be overstated, the importance in selecting the right film for the right subject; and while this is true in black and white, it is doubly true for colour slide film.

35mm transparency film

It never ceases to amaze me the difference between the same room on an overcast afternoon, and a sunny one. Where before I was fighting to keep enough light on the models to work by, on this afternoon, there was more than enough light - occasionally I put my shutter-speed up to 1/250th of a second just to keep my focus as narrow as I like. The work went fast, and the models were running out of ideas for poses before I was out of film.

Where the first session in the front room with Joe and Billie left me with a couple of good images, and the feeling that I was on the right track, the second session, the second session gave me everything I was hoping for and more. The luminosity and glow which contributed so much to the Thalamus work was present throughout the session, and even some film tests I did with a Fuji 6x9 rangefinder turned out successfully.

6x9 cm transparency film

The flurry of photography initiated by Joe and Billie's arrival on Christmas day brought a wonderful close to my year. 47 rolls of 35mm and 120 film, and 12 sheets of 4x5 film were the results of more than thirteen hours of working over three days. The body of work we produced together has a consistency that is encouraging, while also opening areas of work with had previously only been ideas. The overwhelming success of the colour images over the black and white has left me somewhat baffled, but regardless, the final body of work is a great addition to my work as a whole.

A Second Couple's Shower Session (Halifax, Nova Scotia)

35mm transparency film

The second shower session for Billie and Joe seemed to more promising than the first. The day was bright and sunny, which lead to there being four times as much light in the shower, which I thought would lead to better exposed images. In reality, all it did was increase the contrast; as the room was lit by a skylight, the model's heads and shoulders were better lit, along with anything else that was light from directly above. In contrast, everything else became empty shadows.

35mm transparency film

The only real success from the session, to the right, made it worthwhile, however, being the strongest of any of the shower nudes done with Billie and Joe. The crisp, sharp transparency captures every water drop with wonderful detail, almost in spite of the obvious film grain.

35mm transparency film

I suspect that I'll have to learn to work around the inherent contrast in the shower if I continue to explore this space. The encouragement of the few images that did work far exceeds the frustration for the failures.