Andree on a Sunny Day

Digital infrared original

Early spring in Nova Scotia can be a challenging time to work in woodlands; with only sporadic leaf coverage, direct sunlight can still be challenging to deal with, but it is a small price to pay for the lack of bugs, which will prevent working in the forests over the height of Nova Scotian summers.

Digital original, 8 frame stitch

Trees are actually quite hard to pose a model with, especially thin, spindly ones like this. Fortunately, we were able to find a pair of trunks that spread out from the same base, permitting Andree to pose between them, I then used an ultra-wide f/1.2 aperture to separate her from the cluttered and confusing background.

Digital infrared original

Created at the end of a session, this portrait took advantage of the shade in the rock quarry we’d found - the direction of the light on Andree’s face came from working with the rock face behind her. I would have loved to have been able to make an image like this in the forest, with a softer, more luminous background, but there just wasn't enough leaf cover to create the soft directional light so crucial in this portrait.