The Glen is one of the most interesting natural phenomena on the Coolera peninsula of County Sligo : it is a narrow, deep and long chasm on the south face of Knocknarea, a massive rocky hill that is caped with a giant rocky cairn known as "Queen Maeve's grave". This microvalley in the limestone hillside runs for about three quarters of a mile and averages 20 metres deep, with sheer limestone cliffs on both sides.
Finding the entrance to the Glen proved quite straight-forward, thanks to detailed instructions found online, but getting in to the heart of it proved a little more challenging. Thick mud on the route in force a retreat to the car to don rubber boots, and even these proved almost futile, as I stepped into mud so deep on the way out of the Glen that I filled one boot with thick, viscous mud. I shudder to think of how inaccessible the space would be after a couple of days of rain.
In some ways, the simple question of where to start photographing in the Glen was the hardest; the location was so visually rich that everywhere I looked had potential. For lack of other guidance, began working with Ingrid at the far end of the clearing, and then we worked our way back to where we entered it. Given how verdant the location was, I worked exclusively in colour, hoping the contrast between Ingrid's skin tone and the sea of green around her would make the images pop.
It is ironic that, for all the beauty and majesty of the location, the greatest challenge Ingrid and I came up against was a familiar one - the question of posing with trees. In Nova Scotia, where trees tend to be smaller, a Nude next to a tree can look disconnected; in the Glen, with massive trees towering overhead, it was even more disproportionate. In the end, for the most part, I decided to focus on lines and form (i.e. the trunk), and not worry about the trees as a whole.

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