Victoria, the Alberta Portfolio XXII (The Badlands, Alberta)

As we drove from East Coulee further into the Badlands, the landscape only got wilder; the multicoloured layers in the slopes became even more pronounced. Like Writing-on-Stone, the biggest impediment to working in the Badlands was tourists. Though we selected a spot to work off the beaten track, we'd only been photographing for perhaps an hour when a truck drove up with a family bent on exploring. Victoria had just begun to hit her stride when they arrived, and unsure how long they were going to stay, Victoria and I decided to wait them out. An hour later, they drove off, and rather than risk a similar incident, Annie parked her truck across the only access road to where we were working, thereby guaranteeing our privacy for the remaining hour or so.

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The sand here was far more stable than at East Coulee, though whether this was because the area had less rain, or simply because it had baked in the hot sun for longer, I am not sure. Regardless, in the final space we worked in, the sand was like rock, and far easier to move about on. The only down side of this was that it was very hard on Victoria; adjusting poses was not dissimilar to slide about on pieces of very harsh sandpaper!

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Like the formations at Writing-on-Stone, everywhere I looked in the Badlands, I saw potential images; the fluid lines and repeating patterns suggested so much, and the last three hours of working in Alberta were spent selecting which possibility to explore. With a definite time limit in mind (we had to be back in Calgary in time to make our flights back to Halifax), I tried to work as efficiently and swiftly as possible, not taking the time to work with "might-be's", and concentrating on what was clearest to me. As has happened before when provoked to work fast, the work in the Badlands seems very true to my intent, with little divergence from my goal. With time and patience, I might very well have produce much stronger work, but I suspect the images I left behind were only subtler variations of those I came back with.

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Two new problem reared their heads in the Badlands: heat and bugs. Most of the time I was in Alberta, it was cool and overcast; in the Badlands however, the temperature soared, passing well into the 30's. We'd seen cacti at Writing on Stone and the Red Rock Coulee, but this day was the first time we'd experienced the temperatures that came with the flora. And then there were the bugs. Elsewhere in Alberta, we hadn't encountered a single mosquito, but as soon as the sun was behind the hills, Victoria and I were swarmed by them. Foolishly, after seven days of bug-free environments, I'd left the bug-spray behind, and in the end, it was the bites, not our departure schedule which ended our last session in Alberta.

Victoria, the Alberta Portfolio XXI (East Coulee, Alberta)

It was on my last day in Alberta that Annie, Victoria and I finally made our way more than half way across the width of the province, to the Badlands, near Drumheller. Like the mountains, the Badlands had been what I had envisioned working with in Alberta, multi-coloured strata of mud and sandstone being worn away by wind and rain; perfect for moulding the figure to.

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Like our other drives around the province, much of the landscape we saw traveling to the Badlands was flat, endless prairie. At times we would sweep down into a green, tree-filled coulee, but on the whole, for hours on end, the driving was along straight, flat roads between seemingly endless fields. Then we turned off the main highway, and wound our way down into east coulee.

To try to describe the experience (in photos or words) is futile. What the plains are, in all their flatness and expanse, the Badlands are not. Driving down from the plains towards the Red Deer River, the sides of the gully, normally green and delicate, became multi-ridged and colourful. The sides of the valley gradually became a continuous erosion-scape, with the chaotic trails of hundreds of rivulets shaping the landscape.

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Just before the East Coulee opened up and spread to either side of the river, we stopped so Victoria and I could make some images. What I had thought was sandstone, turned out to be mud; when dry and hard, it is as solid as sandstone, but we arrived the days after a rain, and it was quite soft, and it was only with care that Victoria and I managed to get up to the areas where the flow lines in the rocks were most pronounced.

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Because of the tight time-frame, I only worked with 35mm infra-red at East Coulee; the climb up was treacherous, and I doubt we could have hiked the view camera and tripod up without taking considerably longer. The afternoon was the hottest since I'd arrived in Alberta, and combined with the near-desert conditions, it made for a scorcher of a day. As we were working, I mentioned to Victoria how great it would be if the film recorded the sand darker than it was - which was just the case. The direct sun, combined with the dark sand and contrasty rivulets made for a series of very dramatic images. Because of the slope of the coulee side, and the slippery nature of the ground we were on, only a limited number of poses and camera positions were achievable. After finishing a roll of film, we scrambled down to the truck and drove on, hoping to find even more drama further up the river.

Victoria, the Alberta Portfolio XX (Red Rock Canyon, Alberta)

After working up in the high mountains, and before leaving the park, Annie drove us to Red Rock Canyon, where a river has cut through soft red sandstone, and left behind a wonderful canyon of water-carved rock. Like the Red Rock Coulee, I had seen photos of the space at Annie's, but nothing in the images had prepared me for the rich colours and shapes of the canyon. Due to the Canyon's high sides, the path that the tourists take is high above the stream; Victoria and I clambered down into the canyon and crisscrossed the stream to move into the spaces we wished to work.

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The strongest image, above, has an almost static or pasted-up quality to it, because of the pose, yet the dynamic nature of the composition, with all the lines leading directly to Victoria, combined with the static pose, and the vibrant, fluid landscape, add up to a very vivid image, almost in spite of its simplicity.

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Because the Canyon was so deep, and the hour so late in the day, the exposures were a full second in length. This strengthened the images, in that the motion blur of the water was not an option, but a requirement, but it also influenced the poses that were possible,

Victoria, the Alberta Portfolio XIX (Waterton National Park, Alberta)

From Annie's very first invitation to visit Alberta and work with the Nude in the western landscape, the Rocky Mountains had been in my mind's eye as the ideal setting. Working out the logistics of our visit to Waterton, however, proved to be a challenge, and it was not until the day before our return to Halifax that Victoria, Annie and I finally ventured into the mountains.

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Having never worked with anything remotely similar, I had no point of reference on where to begin with the mountain Nudes. The first image, made a couple of hundred feet from the road, by a mountain stream, show little of the setting, and draws more on the familiar territory of water nudes than anything else. It really wasn't until the second stop, further into the mountains, that we really began to get images that met my expectations.

The apparent contradiction of mountain photography is that mountains are so big they need a wide angle lens to get them all in. The problem this creates is that wide angle lenses also make far away things loom smaller, and farther away. The dramatic mountains which surrounded us were reduced to small hills in the background. While both Victoria and I tried hard to work with the spaces, inevitably, the mountains overwhelmed the Nude, or the Nude overwhelmed the landscape. It seemed to be a difficult problem to overcome, especially with only one session to get it right.

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As it turned out, the wide angle approach worked better than I had anticipated. My favourite image, an infra-red with a wonderfully contorted figure and a dramatic sky, uses the spatial distortion inherent in ultra-wide angle lenses to great advantage. The sense of foreground and background is muted to the point of malleability, making the image a delight for the eye to wander.

The most time consuming image of the day was also the last. As we returned from deeper in the park, we drove past an outlook which was on a rock outcrop, hundreds of feet over the river below. The scene was stunning. It was also a major tourist stop, with cars pulling in and out by the minute, with very little, if any, time between. Victoria, Annie and I all conferred and decided that the vista was too great to pass up, and began planning the shot.

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We could see traffic in both directions about 30 seconds before they would swing into view of the look-off. I set up the camera, framed the image (again using a 75mm wide angle lens on the 4"x5" camera) and Victoria posed the image, fully clothed. Then we waited. First people stopped for the view. They then asked about the camera. Then they had to take their photos, then they asked more questions, took more photos, ate food, drank drinks, walked the dog, played backgammon...well, you get the picture. After almost 35 minutes of patience, however, there came a gap - a full minute or more, without cars. We sprang into action, and made a swift series of images. These were the final images of Waterton, and the most elaborately planned!

Victoria, the Alberta Portfolio XVIII (Belly River Coulee, Alberta)

After the exhausting previous day, Victoria and I decided to stay closer to Annie's ranch on this day, walking down to the coulee and working with the trees and riverbank. It was a little cool, but there was the promise of sunshine, and warmer weather in the air, so we proceeded with optimistic hearts.

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Often, when working with a space that hold great potential, it can take some time before a model unwinds and become in tune with the surrounding, a process which can be crucial in finding the right poses for a particular place. This particular morning the first images were stiff; both Victoria and I trying too hard, and even at the time (I didn't see the negatives until over a week later) I could feel that the images were forced. Then, between images, Victoria paused to put more sun-screen on. As she bent over, applying the herbal salve to her legs, I looked over and instantly asked her to pause. Working quickly with my 35mm camera and infra-red film, I made a number of images, all strongly referring to Degas' dancers and nudes from a century before. The grace of the line, from Victoria's legs to her shoulders, is what pulls this image together, with a show focus separating her figure from the surroundings.

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From then on, the session went swiftly, we moved through four different locations with a fluidity that pointed out how stiff and posed the initial images were. With the infra-red, we explored a low tree/high bush on the coulee floor, setting Victoria within the spreading trunks and against the brilliant glow of sunlit grass.

The best series of images made on this day were created with Victoria upon a fallen cottonwood tree. A swift-growing deciduous tree, the cottonwoods are especially vulnerable to the high winds on the prairies, and with every wind storm, more split and crack, some lose branches, while others fall to the ground all together. This particular tree had fallen totally over, its three diverging branches presenting a perfect platform to work on. Using my wide angle 75mm lens on the 4"x5" camera, I made four images, all working with the strong lines generated by the tree and the body upon it.

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While the images in the coulee do not ring with a sense of the unique landscape of Alberta, they are none the less a strong component of the project as a whole. Perhaps the most restful of our days since Victoria's arrival, the hours we spent in the coulee neatly wrapped up the potential I had seen previously, but have been unable to address.

Victoria, the Alberta Portfolio XVII (Red Rock Coulee, Alberta)

After finishing up at Writing-on-Stone, Annie, Victoria and I set out for Red Rock Coulee, which lay over an hour to the northeast. I'd seen some snapshots of the place at Annie's, and was very curious about the bizarre spaces shown in the photo album. When we left Writing-on-Stone, it was mid-evening, but again, given the driving distances inherent in working in Alberta, we didn't pull up into the deserted parking lot at the coulee until about 20 minutes after sundown.

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I had seen some photos of Red Rock Coulee at Annie's house, but nothing had prepared me for the wasteland that presented itself when we walked up to the top of the ridge. The arid desolation of the space, combined with the bizarre geological formations which were strewn around added up to a unique landscapes. The soft windswept bedrock hill, made of Bearspaw shale, has large (1.5m to 4m) round red sandstone boulders in various stages of emergence. As the sun had already set by the time we arrived, Victoria and I hurried through the rolling field, quickly noting which formations caught our eyes.

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The fact that the sun had already set before our arrival presented some distinct challenges, forcing both Victoria and me to work fast to catch the last light. With little time to experiment with poses, we worked on the fly, making an image or two at each boulder, and then moving on to the next.

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When we started the exposures were a quarter of a second at f/16, which is more than manageable, but by the time I made the last image of Victoria under the darkening sky, the exposure had lengthened to a second at f/11 - in the half-hour we worked, the light had decreased by a factor of eight!  Because of the overcast sky, there was no problem with the over-all contrast over the time we worked, as the fading line of the sunset on the horizon was the only direct light source, but by the time we were packed up and back in the car, it was pretty much dark.\

Victoria, the Alberta Portfolio XVI (Writing-on-Stone, Alberta)

When I began planning to go to Alberta, most of my hopes were set on the Rockies, anticipating working with the Nude against their rugged heights. After my first taste of the hoodoos near Cardston, however, I had far more interest in continuing to explore these strange rock forms, drawn to their soft-carved shapes and dramatic stratification.

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It seemed like most of Alberta was miles away from Annie's, and Writing-on-Stone was no exception, being over two hours away by car. The drive was more than worth it, though, for as we came down off the plain into the coulee, the rocks literally made me gasp. The Cardston hoodoos looked like child's models compared to the hundreds of varied shapes which unfolded before us as we traveled along the top of the rock-forms. The space was even more amazing when we moved off the road.

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Being a national park, Writing-on-Stone was a more populated than most of the places Victoria and I have worked in the past but, with Annie watching from above, we started working immediately, totally entranced by the multiplicity of potentialities. Our enthusiasm was a little premature, however, as time and time again we were interrupted by Annie's casual comment of "Group approaching" or "Family coming up." It seemed like every image or two, Victoria would have to huddle back into cover and we'd wait for people to pass. It was only at the end of the session that we discovered it was not the large format camera and possibly nude model that was attracting all the attention, but a small grey rabbit, huddled under a rock just above where we were working.

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Eventually, we gave up trying to work in the spaces that called to me directly, and changed our approach. Annie found an area that was well shielded from view, and stationed herself as lookout between us and the main path. This permitted us more freedom to work, and lead to the strongest poses of the day. Where before I time and again found the perfect space, and was unable to work with it because of the random appearance of tourists, here Victoria had freedom to find the poses which worked, and though the rockscapes were less dramatic, the end results were more than pleasing.

Victoria, the Alberta Portfolio XV (Waterton, Alberta)

From the very beginning, one of my hopes with the Alberta trip was to work with the Nude in mountains. I'd gone through the Rocky Mountains over a decade before by train, and ever since, their majesty has haunted me. That said, it was three days before Victoria and I had a chance to work with the mountains, and even then, they were only a background.

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Earlier, in my exploratory drive through Waterton, I'd walked out on a beach below Vimy Ridge, hoping to find a secluded spot where I'd be able to work with a model. The beach was littered with driftwood, much of which was too small to work with. At the very far end, however, just before it turned into marsh, there was a perfect log. Curving up out of the beach rock, the trunk was broad enough to lie upon, and was at exactly the right angle for the model's body to lead up into the mountain.

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With this space in mind, Victoria and I set off to work. The day was cool, so we worked as quickly as possible, setting up the pose and camera position while Victoria was clothed, and making the image as quickly as possible, to minimize her exposure to the cool air. Though I only had one specific section of driftwood in mind as we walked down the beach, Victoria spotted a second space, which we worked with as well. The final image on the beach was made right next to the parking lot; a wonderfully shaped trunk and root section just called out for a body to intertwine with it. Annie kept an eye on the road and parking lot while we made the image, and after perhaps 30 seconds of feverish activity, we made the final two Nudes on the beach.

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On the whole, I am pleased with the images, though they suffer from an issue that would crop up later, when Victoria and I would finally get to work in the mountains proper. While the grandeur of the mountains is undeniable, the battle between the figure and the landscape for the viewer's attention is particularly evident with these images. Producing images where the two are brought together in a good balance will be the most challenging aspect of working with mountain nudes.

Victoria, the Alberta Portfolio XIV (Sofa Mountain, Alberta)

We woke this morning to a surprise: the low foothills and the mountains behind were covered in a dusting of snow! Snow in July. Since the day of my arrival, there had been snow visible in the mountain peaks, but now the entire range was covered in snow.

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My initial disappointment in losing a day's work to cold weather was mitigated by Victoria's offer to do a couple of snow nudes, provided we had the truck near by, and worked quickly. As both conditions were more than easily accommodated, we began the lengthy discussion of where to go. This, along with group inertia, delayed our departure until shortly after noon.

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By group consensus, we headed off to Sofa Mountain, the site of a forest fire in the previous fall. The burn site was covered with blackened aspen, but by the time we arrived, the snow had melted, and the only evidence of its presence was the damp earth and chill in the air. Snow was still visible a mile or so away, but given the air temperature, and the late hour, we stayed close to the road and made half-a-dozen exposures. The disappointment of the melted snow was only surpassed by the realization, after processing the film, that my 120 roll back was scratching film, quite severely in some cases. While the images are printable with some digital retouching, conventional enlargements are out of the question.

Victoria, the Alberta Portfolio XIII (Mountain View, Alberta)

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The final photo session for this busy day took place about an hour after sunset, with the fading glow of the day retreating behind the mountains. For several years, I have wanted to work with sunsets and flash combined, but have never been in a setting at the right time, with the right equipment.

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Alberta, however, presented a chance like no other, as in addition to having a practically captive model and a wonderful sunset vista, one of the other photographers attending the retreat had brought along a portable flash system. After a detailed technical discussion of my plans, and a rundown of the flash kit, he generously permitted me to use it for my planned sunset imagery.

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Setting the camera upon the edge of the coulee, Victoria selected and held dance poses for the entire exposure (8-16 seconds) which began with a single flash burst. The goal was to have a well lit profile of her body, with a soft blur around her, against the fading sky. The effect was less than successful (the 8 second exposure overexposed the sky, making it look more light day than the last moments of a sunset, but it is a start. If I get a chance to do similar imagery again, I will bring along a Polaroid back for the camera, to test the exposure/flash combination prior to making the final exposures.

Victoria, the Alberta Portfolio XII (Mountain View, Alberta)

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Annie's house was spacious and bright, with large windows in all the right places (for photography at least), and Victoria and I started with her simply sitting in a   covered white chair. Moving from working outdoors, where I am directing the model into poses I see with my mind's eye, into a situation where I am simply reacting to what is before me, was a nice change; I by far prefer the former, but exploring a static pose it is a very different process, being almost a technical exercise. That said, I was very pleased with the result, above, which very strongly reflects my intent at the moment of creation. The strong flow of Victoria's hip creates a very rich motion in the image, which keeps the eye dancing within its borders.

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After we finished with images in the chair, Victoria and I revisited the skulls hanging on Annie's walls. Working on top of the dining room table, which is almost totally surrounded by windows, we made half-a-dozen photos with each skull, working again in a studio-like environment, in order to best focus the images on the interplay between the body and skulls. For the most part, I just had Victoria hold the skulls in manners which used them as mirrors or counterfoils to the body; as with the outdoor skull photos, these images focus just on the body and bone, with no reference to the landscape or setting of Alberta.

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The results of the afternoon were very pleasing (though I didn't know how pleasing at the time, as none of the film from Alberta was processed until  my return to Halifax), and present a few possibilities I have never considered before. I seldom use any props when I work with the Nude in the studio (some vague ideas of nudes and roses in an early session or two were quickly abandoned), but the power and effectiveness of the skull nudes has me reconsidering this approach, and pondering the possibilities.

Victoria, the Alberta Portfolio XI (Mountain View, Alberta)

Since Victoria's arrival in Alberta, the days had grown progressively cooler, and this day's dawn brought drizzle and mist from across the plains. I had hoped to use the day to begin working with the mountains, but with the cloud cover to the west even denser, I resigned myself to waiting to work with western peaks as a background another day.

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As the morning progressed, the rain moved off, and Victoria and I decided to risk a trip down into the coulee, as we couldn't tell if it was warm enough, never mind dry enough, for her to model. After a walk down the steep slope, we discovered that down by the river, the wind present up on the plains was barely more than a whisper, and while the air was not pleasantly warm, it certainly was not going to present a problem during short periods of nudity. We began working, photographing as we progressed up-river towards an abandoned shack on the floodplain.

When we reached the shack, we found an added visual bonus; inside the shed someone had hung a deer skull to dry right beside an old window. Coming so soon after our first images of Victoria on the black cloth with the skull, we both agreed we had to work with it. Initially, I had thought to make an image of Victoria standing next to the skull, but the floor inside the shed was rotten, forcing us to instead work outside. The final image of Victoria with the skull has a drama to it which I suspect would have been missing from my initial idea; the worn wood and black window against which the Nude and skull are set provide a rich, yet appropriate backdrop for the two.

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The final image from the shack is strongly related to the bridge Nudes I have produced in August 1998 and April 1999. While the floor was rotten, the ceiling timber in the building were intact, and I asked Victoria if she'd climb up and work in the beams. Normally somewhat hesitant about heights, Victoria set aside her fears and went up the ladder, knowing full well her images would share a website with those of the intrepid Ingrid.

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After walking back up to the edge of the coulee, we turned to see the clouds clearing over the mountains, and the sunlight breaking through them. Not wanting to pass up this serendipitous chance, we stopped and made a number of photos of Victoria standing on the coulee ridge, with the receding valley behind her. The drama of the light, and the soft elegance of the pose is uncommon in my work, but it is one of the few images I made in Alberta which gives a sense of the coulee as a whole, most of my other images focus on small, refined elements of the space.

Victoria, the Alberta Portfolio X (Sout-Western Alberta)

After a hearty lunch and some relaxation, the entire retreat group bundled into cars and headed out in search of spaces in which to work. On our drive to pick up Victoria two days earlier, Annie and I had passed by several old barns and abandoned farms, and it was to one of these that Victoria and I went, hoping to build on the morning's work in the house.

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The first thing we did when we arrived at the McAlister homestead was explore the immediate vicinity. The small farmhouse, which I'd been hoping to work within, was firmly shut up, and neither I nor Victoria had any interest in becoming criminals and breaking into the house simply for some photographs. The outbuildings, however, were all open, and after making some quick images of Victoria standing in the tall grasses behind the house, we moved into the smallest outbuilding, a small shack with a decided lean to it.

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Similar to the homestead where we'd worked earlier, the feed shack had wonderful light coming through the cracks between the wall and roof boards. Also, with the later afternoon light, a broad sheet of light was coming through the window on the far side of the room, providing a good amount of reflection up from the floor. We worked in the space for a number of images, varying the pose and composition.

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It was about an hour before we finally left the farm, during which time the other retreat members explored and played with the settings. At the close of the second day of working with Victoria in Alberta, I was feeling very satisfied; both sessions had gone well, and I was confident that the decision to fly a model out was paying off already. As opposed to starting out with a  new group of models, and building a relationship and body of work from scratch, Victoria and I simply picked up on our work in Nova Scotia, building the Alberta Portfolio on top of a year's experience making images together.

Victoria, the Alberta Portfolio IX (Mountain View, Alberta)

This day dawned cool and overcast, the sky a single blanket of clouds as far as the eye could see. As the morning progressed, the clouds burned off, but to the west, the mountain-tops remained covered in clouds. Given the weather, Victoria and I opted to stay close to Annie's, and went into the small town of Mountain View to work with an abandoned house. In preparation for the retreat, Annie had received permission to work within a number of spaces close to her home.

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The light within the building was wonderful, with direct shafts of light flowing between the roof boards and enough ambient light reflected off the disintegrating plaster and wood walls to more than fill in the shadows. The real problems arose with the crumbling conditions inside. There was ample evidence of horses walking through the ground floor, but the sagging condition of some parts of the second floor made me seriously question its stability. The stairs were solid enough, however, and once some debris was cleared, there was more than enough space for us to begin by making a series of images on the stairs.

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The allure of ruined buildings for me is in how rich the textures are; setting the Nude against them only accentuates the chaos of the surroundings. I had previously worked with Victoria in York Redoubt, an abandoned Halifax fort, but the images we produced on this day were quite different, working more with the lighting and atmosphere of the space than the physical layout. On the whole, the results were more than I'd expected.

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When we first looked into the house, I feared that it would be too unstable to work on the stairs and second floor, yet almost all the images we produced were made using these spaces. The direct sunlight which streamed through the roof slats helped give a strong sense of space to the stairway, while the soft light which was reflected off the interior walls gave a lovely, even illumination to the remainder of the rooms.

Victoria, the Alberta Portfolio VIII (Mountain View, Alberta)

Early on this morning, while the sun was still on the western side of Annie's house, Victoria and I went outside, along with a skull from Annie's wall, and a black infra-red proof cloth borrowed from one of the other artists. Ever since my arrival in Annie's house, I'd been eyeing the arrangement of skulls on the living room walls, drawn to the wonderful simplicity of their lines and form. Victoria shared my enthusiasm for the shape and form, and was more than keen to help me explore the possibilities.

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Working in the diffused light on the shady side of the house, I exposed a whole roll of 35mm infra-red film, working with the skull in various positions on Victoria's body. The black cloth isolated the two elements in the image-frame, while the soft light lent a wonderful roundness to the forms which would have disappeared with a more direct light source.

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Combining the Nude with the skull was far easier than I had expected, with the flow of the horns and bone easily mirroring the lines of the body. The meaning of such images is fascinating too, pulling me back to my earlier ideas of the Nude, mortality and photography. The wonderful thing about juxtaposing the body and the skull is that they are intimately related, in a non-linear manner. The skull serves as a memory of the impermanence of the flesh, and yet the two co-exist in the image in a most fluid way.

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These images I think will lead to more; later in Alberta, and perhaps back in Nova Scotia. Annie, Victoria and I had lengthy conversations about the cleaning of bones and skulls (burying them underground near ant hills is one method), and her recommendation to buy cleaned skulls from an abattoir is still in the back of my mind.

Victoria, the Alberta Portfolio VII (Mountain View, Alberta)

The final light of Victoria's first day modelling in Alberta was spent down in the coulee, along the banks of the Belly River. As I'd previously explored the coulee, I had several locations in mind, and as the sun went lower in the sky, we moved along the coulee.

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Most of this session ended up being portraits of Victoria; the landscape at the bottom of the coulee was quite fragmented and disjointed, and rather than struggle to find order within it, I set the environment aside, and focused upon the model. There is a particular power which comes from an unclothed portrait.

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One of the biggest differences between Alberta and Nova Scotia, is the quality of the light. There is no real way to describe this difference; suffice it to say there is more, and longer light in Alberta. When the sun goes down in Nova Scotia, there is between 10 and 20 minutes of decent light, before night rapidly encroaches. In Alberta, however, the twilight seemed to linger far longer; "Quiet Light" is apparently one of the treasures of the West, from a photographer's perspective (I personally thought it was the mountains and hoodoos).

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Regardless, the evening light was luscious and alive in a way that never happens in Nova Scotia. The final two image here were both made well after the sun went below the horizon. In both cases, one second exposures were necessary, yet the quality of the light was wonderful, soft and diffused in a way which I have never seen before.

Victoria, the Alberta Portfolio VI (Mountain View, Alberta)

After returning from the Cardston Hoodoos, I disappeared to the basement of Annie's house to change film, and prepare for the evening's session. Victoria stayed upstairs, and when I returned, was modelling for one of the other photographers. Working indoors with available light, he had set up a small studio in the dining area, with Victoria up on the table, against a black backdrop.

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In the middle of this session, Victoria took a break, sitting on a chair against the window to relax - and the light was stunning. Immediately, I made an image on my 35mm camera, unsure if I would be able to recreate the moment later for my view camera.

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Luck was with me, however, and when the session with the other photographer was done, I asked Victoria to retake the poses, and made a series of portraits of her in the chair. The resulting images very successfully capture the light and elegance which stopped me cold when I first beheld Victoria posing on the chair.

Victoria, the Alberta Portfolio V (Cardston, Alberta)

My first chance to work with Victoria in Alberta came the next morning, when Annie dropped us off at the site of some small hoodoos, near Cardston, in south-eastern Alberta. Before I had talked to Annie, when I envisioned the landscape in  Alberta, I  thought solely of the Rocky Mountains, and the Badlands around Drumheller. In the conversations with Annie, however, the term hoodoo came up over and over again. "What," I asked innocently, "are hoodoos?" In reply she e-mailed me a couple of photographs, and my desire to travel to the west and work in Alberta redoubled.

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Hoodoos are pillars of eroded rock, typically sedimentary rock, that are protected at the top by a more resistant boulder (more about these amazing structures can be found here). From my first glimpse of these intriguing formations, I knew they would work wonderfully with the Nude. The swirling lines of the rock were very anthropomorphic, and even the low resolution scans which Annie shared with me showed a wealth of potential.

35mm infrared film

The hoodoos near Cardston are part of a long ridge of rock that runs for miles through south-western Alberta. In some places it crops out and is visible, while in others it is submerged under the broad plains. The hoodoos where we spent the late morning and early afternoon working were on a low hill, above the highway, and directly behind a bustling farmhouse, and looked rather small as we walked up the hill. Upon arrival, however, it quickly became apparent how wrong our impressions were; the hoodoos were a complex series of about five outcrops, each about 25 feet in height. The soft sandstone was riddled with pockets, holes and ledges, which both Victoria and I could immediately see held numerous possibilities.

4"x5" film

As we were approaching the site, both Victoria and I were worried we'd have to limit our images to areas of the hoodoos which faced away from the road, but having reached them, and realized the true size of the rocks, this faded as a concern. Against the side of the rocks, it was very unlikely a nude body would be visible, especially from a fast-moving vehicle half a mile away.

Victoria and I worked for four hours at the hoodoos, exposing every sheet of film I'd brought with me, and four rolls of 35mm infra-red. The morning was hot to begin with, and the day only grew more so; we ran out of water about half-way through the session, and ended up sharing a rutabaga near the end, more for its moisture content than a need to eat. When we finally were picked up by Annie, Victoria and I were both quite hot and tired, but felt the work was strong and well worth the effort. Our first session together in the West was a rousing success, though the lack of water and heat of the afternoon made it hard of Victoria, who was still adjusting to the four hour time change.