This was my first full day of outdoor work for the year - from mid morning to sunset, albeit with two separate models. This approach, dedicating a whole day to the image making process, is by far my preferred way of working. It has a number of advantages over shorter days, the greatest being that I can pursue images as they occur, building on the momentum of the moment, as opposed to thinking "hey, that's a great idea, I don't have time now, I will try that sometime." The session's uninterrupted sustained focus on image creation only strengthens the results.
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6x7 cm film |
I'd never worked on this beach before; a long uninterrupted stretch of shoreline with only one access road, at one end. A twenty minute walk down the beach gave us all the privacy we needed, and apart from a single ATV driver late in the session, the six hours we spent working was uninterrupted (we had easily 5 minutes of warning of the approaching ATV, so all was covered by the time the driver went past).
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6x7 cm film |
The day was spent working along the rocky end of the beach, moving from space to space as the ideas came. It was about 1/2 way into the session when I asked Carol if she'd lie in a narrow tidal pool, thinking to explore the play of the water on her skin, in a similar manner to the Surfacing image. As I moved around the space however, I very quickly became aware of the rich reflections that the water was providing to Carol's torso - an image that suddenly clicked with my mirror nudes. I went to work with both 35mm infra-red and medium format black and white, totally engaged by the narrow reflections in the water. Because of the size of the tidal pool, there were only a limited number of possibilities, but what was produced in that singles spot was certainly the highlight of the session.
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6x7 cm film |
Once I'd worked through the possibilities with the pool, Carol and I moved on to other spaces and possibilities, though the water-mirror-nudes were still dancing in front of my eyes. I was on an emotional high after making those images, and that enthusiasm and energy carried through the images from the second half of the session.
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35mm infrared film |
By the time the session had to wrap up, Carol and I had explored only a small portion of the space's possibilities; like Prospect, the space contained much more then could be worked through in a single day. Without a doubt, I will return to the space in the future (likely taking the 8"x10" camera in place of the Mamiya RB which I used as the main camera for this session).