Flathead Lake and Tina
May 30th, 2009
One of the things I enjoy about traveling to do my figure work is the chance to meet and work with a variety of models who live in the areas I visit. I’ve encountered some very beautiful and talented models this way. Tinytina is a perfect example of this. I contacted her through Model Mayhem and am very glad we were able to work together.
First, she is a very accomplished model…totally professional and brave and bold enough to go ahead and get nude for photos despite the terrible weather on the day of our shoot. It was cold. It was sleeting. There was a strong wind blowing. Tina is a tough lady.
Also, she took us to a location that I would never have found without her guidance. I really appreciate her willingness to share this bit of local wisdom with me. Not every model or photographer is open to sharing location information. But that’s a subject for another blog post.
One of the advantages of bad weather is sometimes beautiful light. I really like the light and color in these photos. They would be very different photographs if it had been warm and sunny. Of course I wouldn’t have had to worry about the models turning blue, but that’s another issue too.
So, thank you Tinytina for being willing to freeze for me. Thank you for being beautiful and talented and making a very difficult situation work despite the weather. I hope we get to work together again, perhaps in a bit warmer situation.
This last photo of Tinytina is pretty different from most of my work. I’m usually looking for a somewhat romanticized sort of photo with everything all beautiful and perfect…a romantic illusion of what nature might be in paradise. But I find myself really drawn to this much more “real” photograph that communicates a bit of the struggle Tinatina was going through to make the photos work. I’m not sure why I like this one so much, but I keep coming back to it, so I decided to go ahead and share it with you.
The news on the truck is not good. The deer did a lot of damage. And the engine isn’t running well now…can’t tie that directly to hitting the deer, but the engine started running a bit rough right after that happened…and it had been running just fine before. Now one cylinder is way down on compression. So the engine is going to have to be rebuilt. A couple weeks of work and several thousand dollars of expense. The radiator also will need to be replaced along with some other stuff that got smashed. I’m looking at possibly having the transmission rebuilt while the engine is out, just because it has a lot of miles on it and will need that done sometime in the future. So, no trips for a while…no wheels for a couple weeks. I’ve been trying to sell my motorcycle, but guess I’ll put that on hold so I can have it to ride around on while the truck is torn apart.
At least the truck kept running through the whole trip and got us all safely back home. So I can’t really complain about anything. These repairs will probably ultimately extend the service life of my truck for a few years longer than I had planned. It only has 200,000 miles on it, so it’s just getting broken in well.
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