A Solo Session with Ingrid (South Shore Coast, Nova Scotia)

As has been the trend, I planned to go photographing tonight with Hailey and Ingrid...but at the last minute, it turned out Hailey couldn't make it, so Ingrid and I headed out on our own, hoping the coast would be cooler than the city - and boy was it ever!

Digital Original

The first compositions of the session took inspiration from my recent focus - working with the movement and power of the ocean. I am particularly drawn the beauty of waves drawing back from seaweed, so I asked Ingrid to pose along the edge of the shore, where a larger waves broke below, and waited for the waves to come. Each time a larger wave surged in, I waited for it to break, and photographed as it drew back from the rocks below and behind Ingrid. After a couple of pose variations, I felt I had captured the potential of the space, and we moved on to other spaces.

Digital Infrared Original

For the most part, this session focused on water (as has most of my work with the Nude this year), but in contrast to much of it, we made a large number of compositions with Ingrid posing in shallow rock pools, and me focusing on both the insertion between the water and skin, and the pools and the surrounding rocks. As the evening drew closer to sunset, the sky began to have some more definition to it, making it easier to include in compositions.

Digital Original

By far the most exciting image of the evening was made towards the end of the session - as we were walking the shore, I saw a perfect "Ingrid-sized dip" in a landscape, directly in front of a wonderful shelf of rock over which waves broke with great consistency. After Ingrid found the pose (a classic back-on image), I proceeded to photograph wave after wave as the ocean broke over the rocks behind her. In the end, after a good 5 minutes, and more than a hundred images, I realized the potential of the image, blending the delicate beauty of the Nude with the raw, unpredictable power of the ocean.

Digital Infrared Original, 2 image stitch

The last set of images of the session were made on a vertical rock face above a large rock-pool (Ingrid wished to spend some time swimming, so we agreed the last set of photos would be made on this rock). The rock had small ledges in it, making it perfect to pose upon, and the near windless evening meant the water below her provided a wonderful reflection, to fill out the composition.

Digital Infrared Original

As Ingrid finished her evening swimming, I noticed the sky above was slowly becoming more dramatic, so I made a number of landscape images of the sky, with the lovely sweeping bedrock of the Nova Scotian Atlantic shore below it.