Alexandra & Liam in the Pool

Alexandra and Liam had come through Moncton on their way west in the middle of the winter and we made plans to work together again when they were on the return leg of their trip. I had hoped that would give us the chance to work together outdoors (all the sessions we have done together to date have been indoors, either with natural light or studio flash), but the schedule of their trip had them staying overnight and being back home in Nova Scotia by the middle of the next afternoon. With this plan in mind, we decided on a studio session on the first night and working with the morning light the next day.

Digital original

After the early successes with my wading pool nudes, I still had some technical issues to overcome. The biggest change was using black plastic to line the wading pool, hoping to conceal the texture of the plastic bottom. It turned out to be the perfect solution, removing almost all sense of the pool below the water.

Digital infrared original, 10 frame stitch

By this session, my third time working with the pool, I had worked out many of the other issues, so the session was much more straightforward than the previous two. Very quickly, I settled on the fact that it would only be Alexandra posing in the pool; Liam was simply too tall to fit. For the first hour or so, the images focused on the single figure emerging from the pool, but once we had worked through all the possibilities that presented, I proposed exploring the possibilities that would arise from adding Liam's arms to the image.

Digital infrared original, 25 frame stitch

It took a little arranging to get him into a position where it was comfortable enough for him to have his hands within the pool; after a bit of experimentation, we found something that worked. As I had imagined, just as working with a couple in a studio suddenly changes how easy it is to find successful images, after working with Alexandra for over an hour, and feeling utterly at a loss for new images, the addition of Liam's hands suddenly fostered the creation of a number of completely new compositions.