Bobbi & Elisabeth at Martinique Beach

This session was a second try this summer at the elusive sunset at Martinique - the session with Bobbi and Ingrid was successful, but I still had ideas in my mind's eye that I wanted to try to realize. Both Bobbi and Elisabeth had worked with me earlier in the year on sunset images and were keen to see what else could be created.

Digital original, 6 frame stitch

As it turned out, the sunset was brief and unimpressive; most of the images we made working with the sunset sky was made well before it dropped below the horizon. Still, taking inspiration for the two-model nudes of the previous session, I made a number of compositions with the two models below the dramatic sky that are more than pleasing. It is frustrating on some levels to feel so close to realizing these sunset images and then be foiled at every turn by the weather, but such is the lot of a photographer in the great outdoors.

Digital original

After the sky lost its lustre, and the water grew too cold for the two models, we moved up onto the dunes, and made a number of images with the 8"x10" camera (these were the same dunes where I'd first worked with Bobbi three months earlier). I made several images of each model, working with Bobbi on an image rooted in some work on the Boutouche Dunes, and making a very striking portrait of Elisabeth. I'd asked her to roll slowly down the dune (a feat that proved both impossible and quite funny to watch) and she'd landed, and then looked up at me from the dune. The resulting image is everything I look for in a Nude Portrait; confidant, challenging, and most importantly, unquestionably about Elisabeth.

8"x10" film

The end of the session came with both models running out in to the surf on the ocean-side of the beach...a little crazy half hour, with me standing to my waist in the water, and the models frolicking in the water.

Digital original

It was in the middle of this session that I rolled past 50,000 exposures made with my Canon EOS 10D, in about 18 months. That adds up to 5,000 rolls on the Mamiya RB I sold to buy the camera...even allowing that I have only kept half of those images, that still translates to more then $10,000 CDN in film (not even thinking of processing) which I have not had to purchase. Digital is not a panacea, and I certainly can't see myself setting film aside in the foreseeable future, but I certainly do not regret the shift of about half my image-making to digital.