And finally Winter, with its bitin’, whinin’ wind, and all the land will be mantled with snow. -Roy Bean
We often don’t get a whole lot of snow in Cincinnati, so when we got snow this day it was time to create something completely different.
I had borrowed my friend Tzu’s wedding dress and plopped on a red wig-the hair is longer than my own, and I wanted my hair to have a little more pizzaz against the white than my plain old brown hair.
The cape is simply a long piece of satiny fabric tied around my neck.
Since my twins were off school, they offered to be my assistants for the shoot, which primarily consisted of them making sure the tripod didn’t topple over. I ran back and forth between the position on the bridge and the tripod, almost creating a bit of a sweat despite the temperature being cold enough to snow.
Once I got the position that looked good, I would yell at the girls to press the shutter, and I’d fling the cape up into the air as hard as I could. This was a little tricky, especially since I was holding a lantern in my other hand.
The light of the lantern was actually added later in Photoshop, as was the snow. It was actually snowing at the time, but you couldn’t really tell in the images, so I had to compromise.
Anyway, there’s no significant meaning behind this particular image–I just imagined a fairytale type lady on a journey in the snow and wanted the scarlet contrast against the stark white of the snow and the dark of the bridge.
By the time we finished shooting, the wig had gone all askance and I was a sweaty, happy disaster.