Veronica Models in Montreal

After Gilda and I wrapped up our morning session, Joy and I had a hurried lunch (thanks to Mary-Jane for finding us a place to eat!) before heading back to the studio for the second session of the day. Besides Gilda, Veronica was the only other model I'd previously worked with from Montreal - we'd had our second session together over the New Year weekend in Halifax, so I was all the more pleased that I'd be able to work with her again so soon.

Digital original, 6 image stitch

As is my preference, I opened up the session with a series of portraits, working with Veronica against a white-painted brick and wood wall, again taking advantage of the wonderful natural light coming through the large windows. Part-way through the session, Jean-Francois, who was working in one of the other studio rooms, had to ask me something, so instead of putting all her clothes back on, Veronica just bundled herself into a sheet of thin white fabric for a moment. When I turned around after seeing Jean-Francois off, Veronica half-dropped the sheeting, just clutching a small around next to her torso - and it looked just wonderful. She and I spent the next twenty minutes or so experimenting with the fabric, and making a whole series of images, both full body and abstract, exploring the possibilities. I think this is rooted in the fabric nudes I did last fall with Kylie, yet they are different, with an almost bridal feel to them (I suspect this is a combination of the soft lighting, and the white fabric).

Digital original

The room in which we were working had a great influence on the images. Much larger then any other studio I've worked with to date, the space gave a real freedom to spread out and work with a variety of viewpoints (usually the spaces I work in are very constrained and severely limit the variety of perspectives and angles I can work from.) I took advantage of this in a number of ways, both in terms of making more multi-image stitches than usual and working with the model from more varied angles.

Digital original, 4 frame stitch

The very end of the session saw us moving from the room in which I'd work for the morning and much of the afternoon, into a much larger space on the other side of the building - if the first room I was in was large, this space was HUGE, running the entire length of the building. It was also unheated (remember, this session was in Canada in March), which was why I'd left it to the end of the session. When I'd shown the space to Veronica, she agreed it was interesting enough to work with, even with the cool temperature. For the first time that day, I left the tripod behind, and worked hand-held, making a whole series of images in the space in less than a dozen minutes. As it turned out, the only images I really respond to well were a set we produced at the end, working with a single large window and Veronica standing beside it...not much different from what we'd produced in the smaller space, (the windows were the same size) except for the perspective - I was more then ten meters away from her when making the image, giving the final photographs a very flattened sense of perspective.