Kris Models at the Coast (Chebucto Head, Nova Scotia)

35mm film

My first full weekend back in Halifax was intended to be split between time with my daughter, and the processing of the more than 200 sheets of large format film I had exposed in Maine..until I received a phone call fro Kris, asking if I was up for a session. Never one to turn down an opportunity to make images, I put off processing the film, and headed off to Chebucto Head shortly after lunch. Kris and I had worked there several times in 1996, but we had only scratched the surface of the possibilities. I could work there every day for a year and still not exhaust its possibilities.

35mm infrared film

Though the day was full of blazing sunlight, there was a cool wind which very quickly took a toll on Kris - though she was still keen to model, she preferred to be Nude for as brief a period as possible. The afternoon was an interesting contrast to the work in Maine - there I tended to work very quickly, and intuitively, the afternoon with Kris was mostly spent walking, searching for images, and then setting them up with great precision. Once I had an image fully framed and readied, Kris would disrobe and take up the pose. In Maine I often spent as long as ten minutes exploring a pose through the camera, with the models nude through out the session; with Kris it was often less than a minute between disrobing and dressing again. On the whole, the session's pacing was about as far from those I did in Maine as it would be without changing camera formats.

4"x5" film

The outcome? After two and a half hours, I'd made 8 frames of 4"x5" and 4 rolls of film - two on 120, one infra-red 35mm, and one on the 35mm Horizont (swing lens panoramic). The session was slow, and methodical, and yielded a number of good images.