More often than not, people in Seattle can safely consider the end of August to be the end of summer. Although the calendar might claim there are still three weeks remaining until the onset of fall, we can usually count on the beginning of September to reacquaint us with the cooler, wetter weather that becomes our daily companion for the next nine months. It was only fitting, then, that the last weekend of August contained my final underwater photo session of the season, a wonderful conclusion to another wonderful summer of submerged imagery.

Well, as poetic as I may have made that sound, it turned out that our summer weather has stuck around for a few bonus weeks. But even though the warm and dry days have remained longer than anyone would have guessed, I resisted all urges to squeeze in any additional shooting, thereby ensuring that this was in fact the last session of the season. Let it be known: Summer 2012–as measured by my underwater shooting schedule–did in fact conclude at the end of August.

I first met Nina a couple years ago when she took part in my Common Thread project. A year later she was one of the first to volunteer to be in the Ant Farm, in which she donned a shocking red wig and stuck a very animalistic pose, one that most viewers tended to linger over when they were looking at the project. After the Ant Farm shoot, we started talking about doing some underwater work, and many months later it finally happened.

One thing that was very different about this shoot relative to others is that we did not run through very many different outfit/prop combinations. While this may have reduced the overall variety of the shots a bit, it gave me a lot more content to work with within each style. Even though I ended up taking fewer shots than I typically do, it ended up taking me longer to sort through them Funny how that works.

The final thing we did was play with the red rope from the Common Thread project, which turned out to present its own set of challenges. The rope was annoying buoyant and kept trying to do its own thing. Bad misbehaving prop! Still, Nina was able to wrangle it into submission; there was no way we were going to let the rope win that day.

And with that, I bid farewell to the 2012 underwater season. I set out with the goal of doing relatively few shoots, and I managed to hold it to just four (which I think is the lowest number ever). I also wanted to work exclusively with models who were knew to me and I met that goal as well: I had never shot any of these models underwater, and two I had not even met prior to our session. I’m calling 2012 a success.