Miranda XVI

The final day of the New Brunswick Portfolio was in many ways the least planned of the entire project - Miranda and I knew where we'd be, near Hampton (see below), but as it is an area of the province I have only been once before, I didn't really have an idea as to what we would do when we arrived in the area to work.

8"x10" film

The one thing I did know is that I wanted to focus on working with the view camera - because of the poor weather over the entire week, I'd had almost no opportunities to work with the 8"x10" camera, and with the last day of the project upon us, I felt almost compelled to focus on that tool to the exception of the digital cameras. This is not necessarily the best reason to chose one particular camera format over another, but given how much work I have done in the past with view cameras, I feel somewhat obligated to have at least some of the portfolio produced with one.

After investigating several different location on our drive towards Hampton, Miranda and I finally settled on working together at an abandoned farm - it was right beside the road, but with the large buildings and high brush shielding most of it from view, we felt confidant that it would be more than shelterd enough to work at.

8"x10" film

With a location selected, the next problem to solve was the lighting - though the morning had started out lightly overcast, as we'd driven south, it had become pregressively more and more sunny. The first set of images we made were produced int he only shade we could find - along side the barn, in a patch of share only about six feet wide. This worked out well for the image though, with the light upon Miranda coming from both the sky above, and the sun-lit grass to her back.

The rest of the images at the farm were made in the sunlight, using contraction development to control the contrast (this basically means that more light is captured on the film by exposing it at a lower ISO (in this case, 100), and in the darkroom with over-exposure is compensated for in the development, which ends up giving the image more shadow detail than would normally have been present). In the end, after working together for close to an hour, I was satisfied that we'd made what images could be produced given the direct light, and the space, so we packed up, and headed off to Hampton, lunch, and our final afternoon of photography.