Marieke's Second Session (Halifax, Nova Scotia)

6x7 cm film

The second session with Marieke was a little more planned than the first. As with Cheryl four days earlier, I spent most of the time this session playing with focus effects, combining it with with more white backgrounds, as I had the first session. By now I had become quite comfortable with how the image on the ground glass translated onto film, and was becoming more deliberate in how I constructed the images.

Almost all the strength of these images comes from the delicate tones and subtle sense of focus. The biggest frustration to emerge in the whole process of making these images is the lack of a way to display them on the Net. Neither of these scans capture any of the elegance and delicacy inherent to the originals, but I have put them up nonetheless, to try to provide a sense of what I am discovering in my focus shift investigations.

6x7 cm film

While I worked with the focus effect on the view camera, I was exploring the same poses with the Pentax 67. As above with Aeyla, I tried to use the same pose to compose totally different images, ones which relied upon colour for their success. I approached the images in the same manner which I used for my B&W work, but instead of using the focal shift as the centre of the image, I made them as graphic as possible, relying on the simplicity of line in the images to hold them together. As opposed to being about colour, however, I now realize these images were about planes. Just as I played with focal planes above, and in earlier sessions, with the colour images, I differentiated the image into planes, this time by use of colour.

6x7 cm film

On the whole, January dramatically pushed my work in two major ways. Where normally I viewed the studio as a practice space, and a source of frustration, I managed to shift it to a challenge, by adding previously underutilized elements. How these elements will blend with my work as a whole I have no idea, but I do know that they have dramatically changed how I think of image making. As infra-red forced me to re-evaluate my dislike of grain, these studio sessions have challenged my ideas of focus, and how it can strengthen an image by reducing it.