Krista Models Indoors (Halifax, Nova Scotia)

The afternoon was spent much in the same way as the morning with Trav and Miranda; working with diffused natural light indoors, exploring narrow depth of field and the simplicity of the figure on white cloth. Instead of two models, however, the afternoon was focused just on one. Krista and I had planned to work outdoors, but when she arrived with a cold, we opted to play it safe and work indoors, with a mug of echinacea tea close-by.

8"x10" film

The other shift of the afternoon, besides changing to a single model, was switching the main camera from 4"x5" to 8"x10"; this had a number of influences on the session, least of all being the speed of our progress - in over two hours of working, only twelve exposures were made with the camera. On one level, this strikes me as a luxurious pace to work at, with lots of time to pause and reflect, but given the reality that the entire time (an average of more then 10 minutes per image) was spent tweaking and refining the compositions, the pacing seemed pretty much as fast as I could go.

From a technical perspective, the images grew directly from the experience of working with Krista and L_ a week before; most of the images were made with exposures of a second or more (up to eight seconds in some cases) and for most, I used the lens wide open, enjoying the soft focus of the large negative.

8"x10" film

The power of the subject's gaze flows through almost all of the images I made of Krista in this session; though the light on her body was beautiful, and the flow of lines that were created by her poses elegant and enticing, it was her eyes that became the centre point of the work, even when they were closed. As usual, I had no real notion of how the session would evolve, but by the time the second negative had been exposed, I knew that this would be almost exclusively a portrait session.

8"x10" film

At the end of the afternoon, when the light had dropped below what was possible to easily work with, we called the session to a close. Krista had endured an afternoon of lying still and sniffling in between exposures; together we'd created what I feel to be some of my best 8"x10" negatives to date. With the weather outside threatening to become cooler, and inevitably, cold, I hope this session will only be the beginning of taking the work from this strong beginning to something larger that will only revealed through the process of creating it.