Millennium Angel (Halifax, Nova Scotia)

4"x5" film

The strongest image from this session was unplanned, as Cheryl and I had gone into the studio to work on a project of her instigation.  One of the images we produced was of Cheryl as an angel, wrapped in white, with her moving her arms up and down over a 16 second exposure, to create an ethereal quality to the image. To ensure we had the right effect, we produced several 4x5 Polaroids, and when we had the exposure and motion right, we then made the images on film.

Digital original (sourced from a 4"X5" film image)

It was at this point that I asked her if she'd mind doing the same pose, but nude. I've used angel imagery in my digital work in the past, and thought the potential in the motion-blurred image was quite high. I asked Cheryl to move her entire body during the exposure, in addition to her arms, to further the feeling of otherworldlyness. The negatives was then scanned and digitally altered, to produce the final image. I used the photograph for a Millennium greeting card, commemorating the arrival of the year 2000.

Kim's First Session (Halifax, Nova Scotia)

This session was my first opportunity to work with a model in over a month, but built very strongly on the session with Victoria six weeks earlier.

35mm infrared film

Kim's had no experience modelling nude, but was enthusiastic and once we began, quickly grew very comfortable with the process. Unlike many first-time models, she actively worked towards generating poses, and took a great interest in the process in regards to lighting and angle of view, all of which paid off in the images.

35mm infrared film

As a counterpoint to Kim's attitude to the work, almost everything else that could go wrong in the studio did; the sync cable between the cameras and the flash-system was erratic, my light meter didn't seem to be working correctly, and film was miswinding and misloading all over the place. I attribute these problems more to my not working in the studio over the previous six weeks than to any bad karma following me around. This was proven to me by the quality of the work from the session. In spite of the glitches and mistakes, there are a good number of strong infra-red images, and a very successful 4"x5" nude.

4"x5" film

Often, my work tends to evolve off of earlier work. This session was no exception.. In my previous session in the studio with Victoria I had concentrated on images with strong graphic qualities, using the body to create lines and spaces within the image. With Kim, I  continued to work with the body as a graphic element. While we had started the session with some simple standing portraits ( I often do this with new models, as simply standing nude and being photographed tends to be difficult, and if a model can carry that off, the rest of the session is much easier by comparison), it quickly evolved in to a progression of images revolving around the lines of the body against black.