The Derelict

The Derelict could either be a reference to the grounded boat in the image below, or it could be to the roommate who punched in the chest the woman who was supposed to model for me yesterday.  Seriously, the model had to cancel on me because her housemate, while drunk and high on mushrooms, punched her in the chest hard enough to give her a big nasty bruise.  What a derelict!

Anyway, without a model I decided to head out to the coast with camera and darkbox.  This spot is just up the road, in Inverness, CA, from the "Launch for Hire" spot where I shot previously.  It was a bright fall day.  I don't like bright images, however.  I prefer moody images, which is one of the reasons I think I'm drawn to collodion -- it seems to render moody images very well.  Anyway, I exposed this one for the highlights, such that the foreground went virtually black.  More importantly, it rendered the sky dark (which under a longer exposure would have gone basically bright white).

The Performer

I've been excited to shoot with Babette for some time, and today it finally came to pass.  And I couldn't be more thrilled with this shot -- I love it.  Babette is a circus performer, and I just knew we'd be able to come up with some cool shots.  She brought some great attire, a super limber body, and a fantastic attitude.  It was an overcast day, but I was still holding the exposures to 8 seconds, for fear of losing too much visual impact to movement, and extending the development times to nearly double normal.  I don't like to do that, but as you can see here the resultant images didn't suffer too much for it.  Not much more to say, other than I can't wait to shoot with Babette again -- she's a bundle of photographic possibility!

The Sheltering Sky

This image evokes for me Paul Bowles' classic novel, The Sheltering Sky.  I love women in confident poses, and this shot hits the mark with its north-african-meets-bohemia look.  The woman, originaly from Bulgaria, is a lovely model, wife, and mother.  I very much enjoyed our shoot.  She had more of what I might call a classic vision for the shoot, and I always like the slightly different.  We settled in the happy medium you see below.  The dynamic with a model is always unique, and I always enjoy shooting with confident and collaborative women. 

From the technical side, there isn't much unique to report from today's shoot (and I think that is a good thing!). 

Madam Wushu

This gal is, among many other things, an accomplished practitioner of wu shu:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wushu_(sport)

The presumption of her ability to kick my butt with two arms tied behind her back is a sound one.  Anyway, she was a delight to be around, let alone photograph.  I have a mongolian sword (or maybe machete) and it seemed to fit her very well.  All in all, it was a great day of shooting wet plate.

On a technical note, I should add that about midday I tried adding a few drops of nitric acid to the developer, which is supposed to add a bit of "brightness" to the silver.  And, by golly, I think it worked great!  I'm going to use it going forward.