Mallory at a Crombie McNeill Workshop at the Mill of Kintail

Finally, the last installment of the Mill of Kintail workshop. I encountered Mallory twice at the Pakenham bridge. I did not work with her at all at Kintail itself. Not sure why ...

The first encounter came after I'd finished shooting Sam and the Stella in the water. I wandered away from the bridge because I saw a couple of groups working with individual models in the reeds and on the shore.

I cam upon Mallory with a couple of other fellows, whose names escape me right now. One of them was using a light stand carrying a round reflector with diffuser on it and a large battery pack. Serious stuff. I hope to see his work at the review this coming Thursday.

Anyway, Mallory was posing in the reeds and I managed a few interesting shots. It was not my setup, so I tried to intrude very little on what she was doing for the other guys, but I did ask her now and again to tilt her chin down to open some space below her irises. I'm very much into getting the eyes right, and hers are lovely.

This first pair of shots is the result of exactly that request. The eyes needed no retouching, she has bright whites in there without any help. In fact, the light here was astounding, as I hardly had to adjust anything ... just some skin softening, a bit of targeted local contrast for lips and lashes and iris and that's about it.



I did ask her at one point to pose in a cat like position in the reeds. I was looking for a more interesting version of the Anik image I shot way back at the Aylmer workshop in June. The result screamed for black and white and I am most pleased at how this turned out. It would look great in a poster sized print.


I went one to shoot a bit of Rebecca on the shore line before wandering back to the waterfall area, where Mallory was in the water and posing. This proved very fruitful.


The smile was a real bonus, as it was genuine ... not for the cameras.


The following image got stuck in no man's land ... the light is not great in this area, so I vacillated between color and black and white and finally settled on black and white. But I don't really know if it works ...


The water was not exactly warm, and I caught a nice pose where she is reacting to a chill ...


She came back like a trooper and reeled off some very nice poses. I like this relaxed image of her leaning on the top of the fall.


This one is even better ...


And my favorite ... which again seemed to scream for a black and white treatment ...


Note the Zoolander / Jolie lip pucker ... she does this *really* well ...

And one final sweet smile to close the show ...


Kintail was a really nice shoot. The water work was great ... I love the movement you can get from flowing water. Were I shooting the setting under pressure of delivery, I'd instruct the models to hold really still for each pose while I shot at low speeds. With the high magnification of the LCD on the D300, it is easy to confirm perfect sharpness.

So that's it.