You always hope to pick up shoots with those you weren’t able to pre-book throughout the week. On Halloween I thought I would just sit around. Then sitting around got boring. Meghan was just sitting around too. So we did this for an hour. 🙂
One of the real cool things about these gatherings is the distance we all have travelled to get to one point on the earth. With the exception of Gerry Oar everyone else is considered far, far away from where I am. Even my countrymen Robert and Carlos are three time zones from me. The trouble with living in a large country.
This section is dedicated to the most distant traveling models whom I worked with in Mexico: Tara, Anne and Emma. Ella Rose had visited me in BC a month prior to the gathering but am mentioning her as part of the long distance group of models. 🙂 I have been blessed with their presence and was wonderful working with them.
I had met Tara the first time at Joshua Tree CA back in 2006 during the CZfest. Coming from Northern Ireland she was as well the furthest to travel (as far as I can recall). Her stay was short and no time was available to work together. 🙁 Being from different locations, the chance to work together in the future seemed unlikely. How times have changed.
You do funny things when you hold a camera sometimes to get certain angles. I know I’m weird.
First video by me.
Thanks to Michael Marlborough for filming the behind the scenes action!
[vimeo 35196239 15 MEXICO]
And a new image from the shoot.
My tenth shoot! In year 10! In the 10th month of the year! On the 30th day of the month! 3’s. 333. I made a wish for good photos. Brooke Lynne is awesome so wishing was kind of silly. Enjoy.
Looking forward to seeing all the rest of everyone’s images! I have two more shoots to post then my fun posting is over. Kind of sad about that. I need a commune somewhere so this can continue all year round. ho hum.
I asked Merrique to give me some pathos…..and managed to get some lovely images, but of course I just can’t help myself….and had to faff with them in photoshop….
Apologies, Merrique! (Bet you didn’t know you were a redhead!)
I even made an iphone cover!
I’ve posted some of these already… developing process was exciting. 🙂
I wanted to use a horse. But I’ve seen so many “nude with horse” photos in my lifetime that I shied away from it and asked to use a Goat. I’ve never seen a “nude with goat” photo before. Maybe there’s one out there somewhere, but it hasn’t crossed my path yet. We still shot with the horses, but not “nude ON horse” in the Lady Godiva sense. So I’m OK with that. We utilized some other random props we found too.
It seemed like Stephanie and “Boots” (the goats name) were doing this tango together on the sand. The owner of the Hotelito had her employee help us with the goat, prepared with nibblets from the feed bin he was on standby so Stephanie could dip her hand into the treat bucket to keep Boots dancing. This was a really fast 15 minute shoot. As always, Stephanie is always in pose ready for my shutter to go off. She really is an amazingly present model. Present in the sense that she’s always paying attention to every detail, conscious of where her body is positioned in relation to the direction I’m pointing my lens and ready to perform magic at my 3 count (1…2… and a 3… click). I always give a 3 count. Habit. I appreciated knowing when the shutter was going to fire when I was modeling. Nothing worse than seeing one of those images of yourself in mid-pose because you had no idea what the photographer was doing. I try to avoid those images when possible. Don’t want models thinking I’m taking crap images of them. Heck, they still may think all the images are crap, but at least they don’t ever say so. haha. But if they did… I’d never post them. Confidence shouldn’t be discouraged. (hey, i’m rambling… wanna see some photos? great!)
Soak up the light at Todos Santos Inn – shot with my home made bendy lens.
This is part seventeen in a series of blogs on my recent artistic adventures in Mexico.
The secluded beach cove at Playas Las Palmas had become quite the popular shooting location as ZoeFest progressed during the week. That was both good and bad. It was good because it’s always fascinating to see what other photographers and models do with the same location. Quite varied and everyone had their own styles they brought to the party. Bad because, as the week went on, we were no longer under the radar.
Todos Santos, Mexico is a very traditional kind of place. It had seen it’s influx of non-natives from all parts of the world in the last couple of decades which had brought about some changes, hopefully not affecting the tranquil beauty or culture in a negative way. But impacting it nonetheless. And when a group of artists sets up camp in an environment such as this as we did during ZoeFest, we were very aware to try not to impact both the environment and culture in a way that would be undesirable to the locals. The old photographers adage of,
“Leave no trace. Leave what you find.”
It probably applies to many other activities that involve exploring anywhere that you’re not a local, but we photographers have adopted it as our own.
Playas Las Palmas presented a tricky dilemma. While the beach itself was not private property, getting to the beach from land did involve crossing through what was private property. Something none of us knew when we arrived. When I had photographed Ella Rose on one of the first days, we were literally the only ones there. Not a person to be seen along the coastline as far as you could see.
But by the time the lovely Tara Tree and I decided to return there, days later, we had started to hear stories from others in the group of, while not exactly what could be termed shakedowns to continue shooting there, but definitely encounters that made it a little uncertain whether it would be possible to continue to shoot there.
We decided to go anyway and see what happened. When we arrived at the end of the dirt road, as close as we could drive to the beach, we spotted Robert and Ella Rose already heading down the path ahead of us. The cove was a fairly large area and I wasn’t concerned we’d be tripping over each other or in each other’s shots.
Tara and I walked through the little tropical forest path before reaching the beach and the glorious late afternoon sun that would be setting in a few hours. I had photographed Ella Rose at the same place in the morning light, completely different from the light now.
This time, as we approached the beach area, Tara and I spotted a couple of official looking men a couple of hundred meters away. It appeared they were inspecting something, pointing and walking a few meters, then pointing away and walking off in that direction. While Robert and Ella were off beginning to shoot in a much more secluded rocky area away from where the men were looking, Tara and I were much more in the open.
We decided to sit and wait and enjoy the ocean view for a while. We talked about our art and our travels and although we were both anxious to begin making photographs, the inspector men continued to do whatever it was they were doing for nearly another hour. Finally they got into their truck and headed off out of sight. And the sun was really getting good by that point. Perfect!
I did really enjoy the brief downtime with Tara. It seemed like I was doing so much rushing around from place to place that even though I was really enjoying myself, it was nice to just stop for a while and relax with such a lovely human as Tara is. She has a wonderful heart. I certainly felt like a better person after our little break.
We began to get ready as Tara laid down in a little stream that had formed over a little sandbar near the mouth of the cove. This time I remembered Ella’s suggestion for me to make sure I didn’t leave any of my own footprints near the delicate sand ripple patterns formed by the waves over the last few hours. It looked like it could be rock with the sun reflecting off of it, but it was definitely sand. Gorgeous with Tara in the middle of it all.
It was really a beautiful time of day. Perfect light.
Tara and I spotted some interesting divots in the sand off to the side of the stream where the tide had been higher earlier in the day and we thought it might be an interesting thing to put Tara in them, her beautiful curves mirroring the curves of the sand. We tried a few different ones until it was difficult to find Tara at all in them, blending in like a chameleon.
I suppose if the Pope was looking to hang one of my nude photographs in his Vatican dining room, one of these would be the least likely of all of my work to raise a holy eyebrow. I’ll have to ask him the next time I see him on Facebook chat.
Meanwhile, back at Playa Las Palmas, the sun was just about ready to hide behind one of the two cliffs that bookended the cove. Tara moved back into the stream and started to pose. She heard some splashing and turned to see me running back and forth in the stream.
“What are you doing?!”, she laughed in her beautiful Irish brogue.
Whah tahr yah doe ehn?!
I stopped in mid gazelle leap and laughed along with her.
“Um… I’m trying to find where the beam of sunlight is best behind you,” I sheepishly said. “You know… because I know you’re holding your pose and I don’t want to have you hold it too long.”
“Alright,” she laughed again, that beautiful laugh. “Just checking.”
Ohl-rate. Joost chay-kehn. (or something like that.)
She posed, I scampered and splashed back and forth. The hardest part was focusing looking straight into the sun, but I got it eventually.
Out of breath and a wee bit tired of looking so silly, we moved over to an area of sand I had noticed the last time I was here at the beach. There were these dark dramatic lines of sand that had washed up along a slightly drier area of the beach. Not a footprint to be found and quite striking.
I had Tara lay down in between a few of them and made of few more photographs of her as the shadows grew in the setting sun. If you look closely, you can see one of my errant footprints as I got a bit too close when directing Tara on which way to lay. We’ll call it a bit of a self-portrait, that one.
I moved around her to compose the length of long shadow her curves were now creating in the sand. Beautiful.
Done with that set, I wanted to try to incorporate the beautiful stream carving in the sand again from a slightly different vantage point. I had been shooting with my short 50mm prime lens up to this point and decided to switch to my longer 100mm prime for a different look. It meant Tara was further away from me, but I really loved how it compressed the sunlight shining off of the sand as the stream had carved through it.
Due to the distance, Tara was a bit confused. “What do you want me to do?”, she yelled to me over the sounds of the crashing waves.
“Something like this,” as I pantomimed stretching my arms out one way and the other.
Happily, she understood my silly posing reference and improved upon it greatly. Another model who can take questionable direction and make it into something wonderful.
I was really happy with what we were doing when Tara suddenly stopped and began walking toward me.
“There’s a man coming toward us,” she stage whispered.
“Is he close?”, I said without turning.
“Getting closer.”
With my back toward the unknown man, trying to keep myself between him and Tara who was trying as casually as possible to put her dress wrap back on, we tried to look as normal as possible. I began to take photographs of the rest of beach area, in an effort to look like a pair of normal tourists out for a walk on the beach.
“Where is he now?”, I quietly asked.
“Right behind you.”
Oh. Damn.
I turned to the man, and said the only appropriate thing I could think of at the moment.
“Hola, señor.”
“Hola,” he said back.
He wasn’t very menacing or anything like that. Just standing there within a few feet of us as I snapped a few more tourista photos of the ocean.
In my head, I was asking all the things I wished I could confer with Tara on. Does he want money? Has he called the authorities? Is he the authorities?
Before I could figure out what to do, I heard Tara begin speaking to him in Spanish. A few questions and he began to give a few answers.
I forgot how fluent in Spanish Tara was. After the translation with las tortugas (the turtles) just the day before.
As with my brush with Los Federales with Meghan yesterday morning, I really tried to follow the conversation as best I could with my limited Spanish. The good thing was, this conversation Tara was having with the man sounded casual, not argumentative in any way.
And then I felt this wash of regret start to fill me. Not about perhaps being in some kind of trouble, but forgetting my first rule when traveling abroad. It was rude of me to wait so long to address him. A far too common American thing. I was in his country and now Tara was making it right.
“Yo soy de Chicago,” I offered at one point. It helped.
Tara would speak a few sentences to him and he would respond and Tara would fill in the blanks to me as I nodded.
He was in charge of watching the property we had crossed to get to the beach and he was checking up on us. He waved his arm over the area between the beach and where we had parked our car. All of that land was owned by a man he worked for. It was okay that we were here, but he wanted us to be aware that he was letting us be here for the moment. More than fair enough.
We asked him if we should leave and he told us we didn’t have to this time. He continued to tell us the story of his family and the family he worked for and how sometimes people would pay them to hold lavish weddings here. I could see how that would be an amazing setting.
I could see three dogs waiting on the other side of the ocean stream.
“¿Sus tres perros?”, I asked. Your three dogs? ”
Sí, mis perros,” he smiled. And then he said something about the dogs I didn’t quite understand, but I nodded anyway.
This was better. This is how I should have handled our meeting from the beginning.
We talked a bit more and said our goodbyes. He walked away and I turned to thank Tara for being such an amazing translator. Without her, her warm spirit and excellent communication skills, our interaction wouldn’t have gone nearly as well. I really don’t think he wanted money in the end, just a bit of respect that perhaps other touristas hadn’t given him. Just to let us know we were on someone else’s property when we came here.
We collected our things and started to head back toward the palm forest path, when I saw a sign near the edge of the beach that had been confusing me all week. It basically translated to Private Property. No Entry. What I couldn’t figure out until now was why it was facing the beach. In other words, you wouldn’t see the front of it until you were on the beach, after you had crossed through the private property. Perhaps there needed to be another sign closer to where we parked the cars. Then again, perhaps it really wasn’t a big deal, until people started to take advantage of it.
My shoot with Tara ended up being a bit shorter than some of the others, but it was a great experience and we did collaborate to make some incredible photographs. Plus it was nice to spend a bit of time with her just getting to know her a little better. One of my favorite moments in Todos Santos.
And it reminded me to be a better visitor next time.
More to come.
The memories are still quite fresh of the time spent in Todos Santos with wonderful friends, some long time and some new. A most magical place which will need to be revisited in the future as I saw only a fraction of what magic it has.
All rolls have been developed and images scanned. Roughly about halfway through the editing and though some of it was ready for presentation a couple of weeks ago, decided to start the posting of work from Mexico in the new year, which is of course, today 🙂 ***due note, Australians had to suffer the wait until the 2nd, ;)***
Normally I do my edits in order of who I photographed first but this time around I decided to draw names out of a hat and the first was Candace. We have worked together numerous times since 2005, both at the Zoefest gatherings and visits to British Columbia. Outstanding model as we all know and never a dull moment.
We shot later in the week and utilized the exteriors of her room. The brick had a lot of character with nice lines and textures. The stucco made for a nice blank canvas for Candace and who is now known as Paco to do their magic.
This is part fifteen in a series of blogs on my recent artistic adventures in Mexico.
Keira Grant pays attention.
There were so many highlights from this year’s ZoeFest in Todos Santos, Mexico. For a first timer like me, getting invited to this exclusive artists retreat meant I had a lot of catching up to do.
One of the brilliant ideas, aside from the incredible photo shoots, was that photographers Zoe Wiseman and Michael Marlborough had planned a series of open air slide shows on several evenings at Casa Dracula where everyone was invited to submit a five-minute presentation of their work, both photographers and models. It was a great way for me, someone never good with names, to get a crash course in who was who.
Plus, seeing all the tremendous work was really a treat.
Days later, when talking with Keira about our upcoming shoot on day five of ZoeFest, she reminded me of a style of photography that I used to experiment with quite a bit, but for no reason in particular, had put away a few years ago. She had seen one of those images in my slide show and suggested we should revisit it.
Very impressive, her recalling a single image of mine during an evening where cerveza, tequila and vodka were in great supply. Here was another model that was doing as much creative thinking about our shoot as I was. Whatever the opposite of phoning-it-in is. I really was getting spoiled with the caliber of models at ZoeFest.
I picked up Keira early the morning of our shoot and we headed off to Casa Dracula. I had photographed Samantha there at the beginning of the week in afternoon light, so I was curious to see what morning light looked like there. It was gorgeous.
While Keira got ready, I climbed over a decaying wall that I had been eyeballing all week to see what was on the other side. Ruins of some kind. I had learned that Casa Dracula was home to one of the town’s sugarcane barons 150 years ago and it looked like not much had been touched since then. A good place to start.
We started with Keira in a very small roofless building. Well, building is probably more grandiose than it really was. It was really just a room of some kind with tall weeds growing inside. I stood a bit outside and used the open doorway as a framing device as Keira found a patch of good light. Good models always find the good light.
We shot for a bit there and then turned our attention to a corner of the decomposing wall.
“That looks pretty crumbly,” I said, as Keira was already half way up. “Careful.”
Another thing to mention is that it’s very easy for a photographer to spot an interesting shooting location before realizing someone is going to be crawling, climbing or laying on it with no clothing to protect them from any number of sharp edges or other skin damaging hazards.
“That looks like might hurt,” I grimaced, as Keira neared the top and began to find a way to balance for her first pose.
“No, it’s okay. I’m distributing my weight.”
And there she was. Perfect. All I could do was to make sure I composed quickly as she shifted through a series of poses I knew I would have been in a great deal of pain trying myself. But she was lovely and made it all look effortless.
We moved on, with Keira swinging from a tree branch against a beautifully chipped wall. Her fun and enthusiastic energy was really making for a wonderfully creative morning and we had barely started.
We headed back over the crumbly wall and inside the house, stopping for a moment at one of the many doorways that made the ground floor as much outside as in. Rather than working too close to Keira, I decided to use a longer lens and step back into another room, again shooting through one doorway toward the doorway Keira was standing in. I like working with negative space. I knew there would be a lot of darkness in the frame, but I was in the mood to compose something that was just the opposite of what we had been previously been doing in the bright daylight.
At one point Keira grabbed an old cowboy hat from nearby (there were always an odd selection of things nearby to grab as a bit of an accent at Casa Dracula), and before I could wonder aloud whether the hat might be a bit cheesy, she somehow made it anything but. In an instant, she was emoting another kind of character. Where there was strength and beauty before, now there was strength and a simmering coolness. Wonderful.
We headed upstairs to explore the rooms there and decided to start in the white room. Stark and almost devoid of anything except a bed with a large mosquito net hanging over it.
If you’re asking yourself, Hey Billy, you were going on and on at the top talking about how Keira had paid attention to something. When are we going to get to that?
Well, it was here in the white room that Keira reminded me again how she had liked one of my images where I was using long exposures to create wisps and blurs. It was true. When I was shooting in Paris a few years earlier I created a series of images with long exposures that created a very minimalist and soft white impressionistic photographs. Lots of negative white space that created almost brush-like strokes of a model I was traveling with at the time.
The light was different in the room we were working in now than the apartment I was living in back in Paris, but I thought it might be interesting to see what we could come up with here. And much like my Paris shoot, there was a lot of finding the rhythm of Keira’s movement and my camera movement to create those brush strokes again. Eventually we began to find the groove.
I was happy that I wasn’t copying exactly what I did before. These would be different. Not as pure white as my previous series, but with very pleasing tones all the same.
We decided to move to another room and continue, when Keira spotted a red mosquito net near one of the arched doorways leading to a small balcony on the front of the house.
I was still taking light readings when I looked up to see that Keira had draped the netting over the doorway creating a red filter of sorts that moved with the breeze passing through. Excellent. Another instance of my model getting me halfway there before I had a chance to put my eye to the viewfinder.
And these would be color photographs. It was just too amazing, although of course I knew I would later play with B&W conversions just to see. I can’t help myself. But as I was composing, I was thinking, color all the way. Compose for the red.
I moved to the back of the room, opposite the doorway as Keira moved and danced while I moved and danced with my camera. We were completely in sync by now. Beautiful wisps of movement, parts of her form disappearing in the strong backlighting as she moved through the long exposures.
After a bit of it, I moved just to the side of the doorway and continued to shoot as she moved, this time with the light reflecting off of the netting as Keira twisted and turned and used the breeze to let the random movement of netting between us make her appear and disappear in my frame as the long exposures softened the movement in another wonderful way. Really stunning.
We finished off in yet another room, with Keira on a bed near an open window. But by that time, I knew we already had some incredible images. If we got anything here, it would just be gravy.
Keira was amazing to work with. She’s one of those models that can hang with the boys until you forget she’s a woman and then when she gets in front of your camera, she reminds you in short order that she indeed, is.
And of course, she pays attention.
More to come.
