A Second Session with Jessica

There was almost a month between Jessica's first session to her second, but I wouldn't have known it from how the sessions started. After walking into the location, we made our first set of photos in some high grasses (in part, I was thinking back to grass photos I did of Hailey several months earlier). Right from the first image Jessica was on point, and the images reflected this.

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After working so consistently with Ingrid and Hailey over the past couple of years, photographing a new, inexperienced model like Jessica is quite a change. In many ways, returned me right back to the core of how I work - the collaboration between the model and I, and the mutual effort to craft the images I record. With Ingrid (after 23 years) and Hailey (after only three years) there is a pretty strong non-verbal part to the process, with the models quickly finding poses and refining them with me, but with Jessica, this session was filled with constant feedback to Jessica on what was and was not working, and why, and very quickly, the session evolved a very strong flow from initial ideals (on either my part or Jessica's) to realized images.

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After finishing the images in the grasses, we moved a little more inland, and stared exploring some rocks and driftwood along the shoreline. Quickly, Jessica and I gravitated towards one bleached-white tree in particular, and after some experimentation with pose,the above was revealed, with the lines of Jessica's back mirroring the flow of the driftwood,  and the direct sunlight reinforcing the shapes it fell upon. With the weather shifting into early fall, bright sunny sessions are now starting to be functional, where only a month earlier the light would have been to directly above to work well.

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As we moved along the shoreline, the sunny afternoon continued to shape the images we made, with me finding spaces that would work with the direction and angle of the light, and Jessica exploring them physically, until the light and form came together into the final composition that worked. At times, I was unable to position my tripod exactly where I wished to be, so over the whole session, entire sets of images were created hand-held, which is quite unusual in my practice.

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One question raised quite early in the session was would Jessica like to work with water (i.e. get wet), and while there was some interest, we both agreed it would be best to save any immersion until the end of the session, when we could bring things to a close quickly and prevent Jessica from being chilled. With this in mind, we headed closer to the open ocean, and I found a space where Jessica could pose securely by the ocean, without being directly in it. A couple of dozen images later, made over a handful of breaking waves, and the above image was made, blending the calm serenity to Jessica's pose with the chaotic energy of the swirling wave behind her. A perfect addition to an already rich body of work with the ocean and the Nude.

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The last set of images were the most surprising, and thrilling of the entire session (and perhaps the summer overall); high on a bedrock outcrop looking over the ocean we found a shallow water-pool; having decided mutually that the ocean was just too active to work with directly, I suggested that Jessica could do a final set of images posing in the pool, crossing off the "water nude" from the day's list, and perhaps creating something interesting. She enthusiastically agreed, and entered the cool water.

I had envisioned images of her figure and the entire pool, focusing on the luminous body emerging from the dark water surrounded by rock, but after creating those, I shifted to my 85mm portrait lens, and made some tighter compositions from Jessica's neck to hip. Just by chance, as I began photographing, some sharp gusts of wind blew across the water, creating a micro-ripple effect - which caught the sunlight, and made it look like Jessica was floating in a sea of stars. Thrilled at what I was seeing unfold in front of my camera, I kept photographing until the wind abated...and the session was done.