I have previously written of my admiration from afar of the late James Ravilious. Something about his soft pastoral scenes shot in B&W charmed me.

There can be a false peace that photography captures. As I stood in the snow storm photographing the dark forms half covered in snow I worried about my car being ticketed due to the impending parking ban.

Looking at the soft images you can't feel the bitter cold or sense my personal concerns regarding possible monetary restitution for vacating my vehicle by the road.

What you can see is simply what the camera captured on a thin layer of silver dust caught in gelatin coating a piece of plastic in the camera. A thin plastic which I forgot for a while in the refrigerator and took out only to shake violently in developer and then scanned.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of working with a beautiful woman to craft some images accentuating her strong, muscular, form.

We didn't have a starting point or a preconceived notion of where these images would go. The idea was simply to capture her body.

Now, one of the challenges of severe lighting (which this is) is that the raking light across the skin is not a flattering light. Bumps (like goose-bumps) would be strongly accented. This makes it less desirable for portrait lighting. In fact it is the opposite of the lighting I was using for portraits only a short time before.

There was balance to be struck between the impressive musculature that she had worked so hard for and the beauty of her sleek form.

The first image was almost the first image I shot. It was such an amazing thing to see in front of me that I may have missed the mark a bit. Perhaps next time I will make Horst proud.