Super Trooper

Wanda has been my best model for a long time. You might say, I really learned most of what I know about photography by shooting her. As that primary model, she has tolerated my passion for images not only by posing for me, but also by standing is rushing water, climbing trees, braving frigid temperatures, snowstorms, and oceans waves. We've often hiked several miles to get to a spot where I want to shoot, and she's right there beside me the whole way (sometimes dragging me along). When we're out shooting, she knows that if I see a bit of water, I'm going to want to pose her in it. I have hundreds, if not thousands, of images of her over the years in streams, forests, deserts, oceans, on on mountains, rocks, beaches, and trails. This post, however, about snow.

Wanda gets cold easily. Her idea of a comfortable temperature is about 90 degrees F. In the winter she wears socks, and house shoes and thick sweaters. But, despite her need for warmth, on more than one occasion she has posed naked or near naked in the snow for me. Take the first image here, for example. We went up to Mount St. Helens one day in late winter for this shoot. We stopped at the entrance to the Mount St. Helens National Monument where the snow was piled up many feet deep in front of the entrance sign. We climbed a steep embankment to get into the wooded area adjacent to the entrance and proceeded to take a series of images I thought would be fun to shoot. Wearing at times only snow boots, she tromped through the crusty snow while I exposed shot after shot. By the time the shoot was over, she had scratches on her legs where she had broken through the crust and the ice had scraped her legs, her lips were blue, and her hands were red. Still, when we returned to the car, she was more than game to strip down for this shot with the entrance sign.

A few years later, we had this huge snowstorm in the valley. I easily persuaded her to go for a walk with me in the falling snow to shoot a series of images for fun. I wanted to experiment with various shutter speeds and with flash to see tje various effects falling snow would produce. I could have easily done it without her assistance, but having her along to pose made it much more fun. As you can see, she was quite willing to accommodate my requests. What more could a man ask?


The last time we shot in the snow, we stayed close to home and simply used the back yard as the setting, but once again, she gamely endured to cold to satisfy my desire to shoot something just a little different. I'll say this much for her, present her with an interesting idea for a photograph and she'll give it her best shot.