July 09, 2004

Kylie at Long Lake

The early work that Kylie made with me was all produced indoors (mainly because it was winter), but her real interest was in working outdoors, with a particular attraction to my water nudes. We did get a chance to work with water in May, but that session was less about water nudes then nudes by water (given it was May, the water was still far too cold for actual immersion for any length of time). Now that summer is finally here, I thought this visit to Halifax would be a good chance for Kylie and me to do some water images.
Digital original, 2 frame stitch
As Kylie had to be at work by mid-afternoon, we had to keep the session short, so we chose to work close to Halifax, using a lake I've photographed in numerous times before - in fact, working in exactly the same space where I'd worked with Lilli in 1998. At this point in the lake, a shallow shelf of crushed rock and bricks runs through the lake, providing the perfect platform for a model to work on - far from the shore, but shallow enough to stand or lie upon without most of the figure being hidden below the water.
Digital original, 3 frame focus blend, 2 frame stitch
Because of our limited time-frame, I chose to work only with the digital camera for the session - the 8"x10" camera would have been slower to work with and also did not have long enough lenses to successfully work with Kylie so far from the shore. For most of the images, I used a very long (300mm) lens, and produced multi-image stitches, generating much higher resolution results than would have been possible using the 6.3 mp camera to generate single images.
Digital original, 8 frame stitch
As it turned out, the decision to use only digital for the session proved to have been a very dangerous one. The images from this session were almost lost to a technical disaster. When working in the field with my digital camera, I routinely download my filled memory cards to a portable hard drive (in this case, a 20GB Super Digibin), to store the images until I get back home, and to free up the card for the making of more images. Over the course of this weekend in Halifax, I downloaded 10 GB of digital files to my portable hard drive but when I arrived home, only 2.7 GB, the last 6 downloads of more then 20, were accessible. Somehow, the data on the portable hard-drive had become so corrupted that the earlier work I'd written to it was inaccessible.

After a week, and some hard work on a friend's part (thanks Sebastian!), all the data was recovered, with only four images being irretrievable. In the end, it was recommended to replace the hard-drive all together, which is what I have done. This experience has left me somewhat gun-shy now, and foreseeable future, I will be much more cautious about how I use my portable hard-drive. Ideally, I'd like to replace it, and upgrade to a different machine altogether.

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