Moss Drifters

• Concept

  This one came from thinking about the kind of mythology you believe in as a kid — nymphs, moss creatures, whatever you'd imagine living in the woods behind your house. I wanted to build that out literally, so I dressed my sister and her friend in white eyelet cotton and covered them in moss, air plants, and sea glass, like they'd grown up out of the ground rather than gotten dressed that morning.

  I shot it in a wooded area with a lot of dappled light, which ended up doing half the work for me — the light coming through the leaves landed on the white fabric in these small, shifting patterns that looked almost intentional, like the fabric was catching something. The whole thing sits somewhere between a documentary shot of kids playing outside and something closer to a fairytale. I wanted it to feel like you caught something you weren't supposed to see.Pomegranates show up throughout in different states — whole, split open, seeds exposed — functioning as both a literal prop tied to the myth and a stand-in for the binding choice at the center of the story. The metal crowns were shot with deliberate lens flare, so they'd catch light almost like a halo, tying the mortal-world imagery back to something more otherworldly even in the brighter frames.

• Technical

  I used Kodak Gold 200 and Revolog Kolor together on this one. Gold 200 did the reliable work — holding detail in the moss, the shadows, the texture of the cotton. Revolog Kolor is unpredictable by design, so I used it to push certain frames into unexpected color shifts that leaned the images further into myth territory rather than straight documentation.

  The prisms were the main tool here. I shot handheld, holding a crystal prism in front of the lens and adjusting the angle until it caught the sunlight right, which scattered rainbow refractions across the fabric and the subjects. Since it depended entirely on where the sun was and how strong it was that moment, a lot of this shoot was reactive — waiting for the light to hit right, then shooting fast before it moved again.

• Credits

  Models | Grace Guido & Katherine Cook

• Features

  Finder Magazine (2015)
  Color Wall (2015)