Yoga in the Snow

  So, I had an interesting photo shoot the other day. I was asked by my good friend Amy to do a yoga shoot for this contest she'd found out about. The only real stipulation was that it had to be a yoga pose and it had to be a cool photo, so immediately the gears started turning in my head. I could have just done something on white seemless and called it a day but I started thinking about cool outdoor venues and if I could somehow incorporate yoga into them. I thought it would be neat to try and blend something relaxing like yoga into the calmness of nature.

This isn't actually the original concept that I had. That one I'm going to keep to myself for now and hopefully soon I'll be able to pull it off and share the results here on my blog. Plans ended up changing when I looked out the window on Monday, our planned shoot day, to find snow falling. Now, living here in the Vancouver area, that is not a normal sight but instead of canceling the shoot I thought maybe we could use the snow as an added element in the photos. Luckily, Amy was still into giving it a go even though she was guaranteed to be getting extremely cold and we headed for a nice quiet spot along a creek near Mission. It was snowing pretty hard by the time we got there so there's not much in the way of set up shots. That and the couple I took were with my lens inadvertenly set to manual focus so they went straight into the garbage bin. You tend to forget things like that when you, your gear and your model are being pelted with snow.

Amy was a champ to work with, I'll say that. She stood in the snow and did pose after pose, with hardly any clothes on while I set up different angles. Finally, I decided she'd had enough suffering and we wrapped things up. Here's a few of the shots, I'll be posting more if I get a chance to pull off my other idea.

I had a lot of fun and I hope to get to do more stuff like this. For now, it's off to Atlanta and back to shooting photos of bikes....

James

 Here's a quick test shot of the first location. I probably could have spent some more time tweaking things but as you can see it was snowing hard and that umbrella started filling up with snow pretty quick.