In
some ways, this session answered some of the questions that were
uncertain, in regards to my relocation to Moncton, New Brunswick, and
maintaining my relationships and work with the models I work with in
Nova Scotia.
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8"x10" film
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From the time we
decided to move, the intent had been to keep returning to Halifax on a
regular basis to photograph and this session marked the first attempt;
after a three hour drive, we picked up L_, and headed out to York
Redoubt to work for the afternoon. As it happened, the day was the eve
of a major Hurricane strike on Halifax. As the afternoon progressed, the
light grew more and more eerie and the wind gradually increased. It
would have been a great afternoon to work by the ocean but the cooler
temperatures, combined with the wind, made it more sensible to work in
the shelter of the woods.
Of
all the landscape I work in, probably the least common is woods and
forests. This is partially because the woods in Nova Scotia tend to be
thick and dark and partially because trees often present a problem for
compositions and posing - being thin and generally vertical, it becomes
hard to compose an image focusing on the Nude without abruptly cutting
off trees at the top or bottom of the composition. With the first images
we made, this was addressed by using an extreme wide angle lens (a 75mm
lens, equal to a 12mm lens on a 35mm camera). This resulted in a
circular image (because the lens is designed for a 4x5 camera, but used
on an 8x10 camera, it did not create an image that extended to all the
corners of the film) but it also gave a great sense of space, with the
trees exploding away from the center of the image. The use of the
super-wide lens helped overcome this, giving a sense of the space around
L_ without truncating the space and cropping in too tightly.
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8"x10" film
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After
working with such a wide lens, I shifted to a longer lens (19", or
482.6mm in length); this gave a more pleasing perspective for portraits
and tightly framed compositions. A side effect of long lenses is that
they also reduce the depth of field, effectively throwing the background
out of focus, isolating the figure from the surroundings. Working with
this lens, I made a number of successful compositions, first focusing on
L_ standing in a bed of ferns, and then with her set amongst the limbs
of a tree.
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8"x10" film
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In
the end, the even, diffused light that heralded the coming of Hurricane
Juan shaped this session as much as the space or model. As the session
progressed, the light grew more and more even, with a particular sullen
quality which was quite different from high-overcast light, which also
gives very even illumination of surroundings.
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