Bobbi Along a Rocky Shore

In the late morning Miranda had to head back to Halifax for an appointment but Bobbi and I still had a couple of hours available to work so we stayed behind at York Redoubt and kept photographing. We decided to move outside of the old searchlight emplacement and work on the ironstone rocks along the shoreline, varying the surroundings as much as possible over the session.

Digital original

Because we only had a couple of hours, I decided to leave the view camera behind in the searchlight emplacement and headed out with only the digital camera. By this time, the sun had moved enough that a significant part of the shoreline was in shade; all the same, at Bobbi’s request, we began working with her lying on rocks in direct sunlight - more out of her interest in warming up than any overwhelming desire to work with the contrasty light. All that being said, through carefully working around her, I was able to find several angles from which the harsh light worked (usually with the sun behind me, minimizing the shadows).

Digital original

Once Bobbi had warmed up and I had exhausted the possibilities offered by the angle of the sun, we moved further along the shoreline to a space where the ocean had eroded the coast down to the bedrock, which had a countless series of steps in it, broken off by years of winter storms and ice. These spaces were perfect for Bobbi to work with and quite quickly we found a couple of ledges for posing. For just a moment, I considered walking back and getting the view camera for the strongest of these images but part of the reason to take only the digital camera was to try to work more fluidly and intuitively than I can with the larger 8”x10” camera, so I decided to stick to the original plan.