A photo shoot has always its purpose. 

The final artifact, is it a reportage for a printed or digital magazine, an advertisement, one photograph 

for a newspaper or a complete shoot for a wedding, determines the way we take a picture, the camera 

we choose, the lens that fits better, any filter we have to apply and also the composition of the final image.

This specific project tried to illustrate a piece of poetry by Lord Byron: “And thou art dead, as young and fair” written in February 1812. Since it belongs to a group of stanzas usually called “of love and death” the main character of these photographs  is the ghost of a girl. Ten pictures ritrace Byron’s verses showing a ghost staring into the sea, towards a cave that actually bears Lord Byron’s name. She remembers the old days in love with the poet as he writes of her in his stanzas. But death is not only present in her figure: those rocks and those waters where se weeps her lover saw the death of many men, whose bodies now lies in a cemetery right over the cliff.

The sequence starts with the panoramic view of Portovenere’s cemetery and the church of St. Peter; the girl’s ghost sits exactly at the center of the image. Then it’s a crescendo in which the camera approaches the girl from the cemetary to the rocks, showing how big nature is compared to man, ‘till it reaches the stone where she lies and it gets closer to her sad face. It all ends with a detail of her hand tightening a wooden rosary which cross recalls the initial picture.

With a view to obtaining the most suitable image, an IR 720 nm filter was used before the lenses so that the atmosphere could be a little spectral, the colours cold, the skin white and sheer. Long-time exposures allowed the sea to take a flat appearance and the hair to move with the wind. Even the dress looks like it’s transparent, increasing the ghost’s purity and lightness.