Lisa at York Redoubt

York Redoubt has long been a favorite place for me to photograph - it is easy to get to by bus, large enough to work in without being concerned about passersby and full of a variety of spaces to work in, ranging from woods and shoreline, to the military forts that are scattered around it.

Digital original, 10 frame stitch

For this particular session, Lisa and I ended up working in the forts by the shoreline. The beginning of the session saw us exploring a gun emplacement cut out of the living rock (and granite at that), but that space was so dark it precluded the making of many images. Cool as the space was, we quickly backtracked and walked down to the York Shore Battery.

Digital infrared original, 5 frame stitch

We ended up working at the old Second-World War search light emplacements, starting with a series of images focusing on an old set of old doors at the back of the building. After making a stitch of the entire image, Lisa and I recorded a handful of different poses within the space, working in both colour and infrared. After these images, we made a number of portraits in the search light emplacement and then moved down to the shoreline to finish off the session.

Digital infrared original

Much of the magic of working with the IR converted digital camera is the magic of seeing how things look in infrared; this is nowhere more apparent than by the seashore, where things are radically different in infrared than to the human eye. Most of the images Lisa and I made along the shoreline worked best in IR, with the seaweed becoming a luminous mass of texture, and the rocks and other debris on the beach remaining unchanged. This setting, combined with the delicate skin tones that the camera renders helps create the most magical images in what, to the unaided eye, looks like an almost monochromatic setting.