Stella at a Crombie McNeill Workshop at the Mill of Kintail

Stella is a model from Barrett Palmer Models whom I had not seen before. I first noticed her while shooting Bryanna in the cloisters when some other photographers had Stella nearby. I took the opportunity to swing the lens around for this shot ...


The next time I saw her was at the bridge, where she was the second model to enter the water -- right after Sam got out. I had just been experimenting with slow shutter to capture the soft, flowing water look and I started out with one of those.


And again, I find sitting in water shots deadly dull unless they are close in or the angles are somehow manipulated to jar the viewer a bit. Jarring enough?

From this crazy angle, I found that I could fill the frame in really unusual ways, and I am really pleased with how these look.



I even pulled back a bit to shoot more of the body once in a while ...


The next one is a nice angle of her shoulders. I found that she presents herself in a compact way and does not present much of a problem with legs and arms at weird angles. In fact, I got so many great images that it was a struggle to pare it down to these 9.


She got into the deep water and I got a great series of images. I only processed a few, since they are representative of the others.

I should not here that I had a world class brain fart while shooting this series. I set a very low ISO, which caused me to be shooting low shutter speeds. That in turn caused me to get softness around the eyes. I should have noticed it was happening and raised ISO to 400 or even 800 ... far better a wee bit of grain than slight blur. These are still acceptable, but I am not happy with them from a sharpness perspective.

Finally, she got up on top of the shelf and lay in the water. I shot several full body images, but none of them floated my boat ... only this one worked. Again mainly because of the unusual composition.


And that's Stella's story at the Kintail workshop.