Alexandra & Liam Pose in a River

Alexandra and Liam have worked with me almost half-a-dozen times indoors on couple nudes, but this session marked our first chance to work together outdoors. With my move back to Nova Scotia in August, I was now only an hour or so from where they live, and it was much easier for us to work out a time to meet up and work together. We settled on a day to spend working together, and by late morning, we were walking into the Petite River, looking for an alluring location to begin working.

Digital original, 8 frame stitch

While the intention was to pose the models in the river, creating a series of water nudes, the first images I made were of Alexandra posing with a lovely tree, growing out of the bank on the far side of the river. The lines and form of the tree were just too lovely to pass by without making an image with them. With the river between the tree and the camera, it was very easy to get the angle and perspective I sought. Often with forest-based nudes, it is hard to make an image from a distance, due to the intervening trees interrupting the view.

Digital original, 12 frame stitch

With the tree nude completed, I began working with the models in the water; starting with Liam. The river, which I'd never worked with before, was absolutely perfect. The flow was slow enough to not move the model during the long exposure times I prefer to use, yet swift enough to clearly blur over an exposure of a second or more. And even though the river was quite shallow overall, it was never difficult to find spaces with the right water levels for the models to work in - often emerging from the shallows.

Digital infrared original, 8 frame stitch

Though the space we worked in was relatively isolated, it was slightly visible from a distant road and house, but at the beginning of the session, a consensus was reached that this wouldn't present an issue to working. It turned out to be the wrong decision, as just under an hour after we started working, we were asked to leave by a local land owner. Interestingly, his stated reason for asking us to leave was a concern over liability for accidents while we "swam" on his property, as opposed to the obvious nudity, but regardless, we had been able to make some very successful images before the request to vacate the river came, so we could not complain, whatever the reason for the request.