January 01, 2005

A Perfect New Year's Day

All through December, while I was planning for Katarina and Lymari's visit in the last week of 2004, I was also trying to work out the details for a possible trip to Halifax during the New Year's weekend. At the beginning of December, Miranda asked about the possibilities of working over the holidays with her and a friend who would be visiting from Montreal. At the same time, Veronica had let me know she would be in Halifax until the New Year and would like to work with me. In the end, at 4pm on December 31st, all the family and camera equipment (one could consider the cameras family members practically) piled into a car and headed towards Halifax.
Digital original
The plans for New Year's Day were a mirror of the January 1, 2003 session with Elisabeth, L_ and Krista, though this time there were two photo session planned with four models. The first was with Miranda, her friend Gilda and Ingrid modeling together in a minimalist setting, lying on a bed below a single window. The session was initially planned around working with just two models, Miranda and Gilda but Ingrid was also available and it quickly evolved into a three-model session. After the experience working with three models in 2003, I was quite keen to have a second opportunity to work with such a dynamic situation.

Miranda was kind enough to let us work at her place, so we set up in the largely empty guest room and quickly began working with the available light. The space was near ideal with bare white walls, and a single window directly above the bed where I'd placed the models. This provided a beautiful angular light over the models and more than enough room to work in the room with the cameras (many of the indoor spaces I have worked in previously have had wonderful light, but cramped quarters, limiting angles I can photograph from).
Digital infrared original
 Much of the work revolved around ideas of repetition, playing off the repeating lines, shape and forms of the three models. Using longer lenses (equal to an 85mm lens on a 35mm camera) I compressed the space between the three models and made a large number of abstract bodyscapes. This approach was the least demanding on the models; for the most part, this required them to lay still and only occasionally change their body positions. There were a number of reasons to work this way; first, it is the easiest way to photograph three models in such a limited space (any other way of posing quickly taxes the space on a bed); second, as it was Gilda's first time working with me, I didn't want to put too much emphasis on elaborate posings - the simpler and easier the session was, the better.

Thought the majority of the images were body abstracts, over the session, I did make a number of images focusing on portraiture but, as Gilda was new to modeling, I was not certain how comfortable she would be with her face in the images so I focused on more anonymous images for much of the session to make the most of the opportunity.
Digital infrared original
Sadly, technical issues pulled this session to a halt before I was really finished exploring all the possibilities that presented themselves (the portable storage device I use to store digital files when I travel refused to download any files) but, regardless, the images we made in the ninety minutes we worked were very rewarding, especially the portraits, of which all three models heartily approved.

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