The Milky Sun

It would have been rude not to have stopped off in the sunflower field while driving past it last week in the south of Germany. Some polaroids, courtesy of Steven Billups (straight scans - no photoshop, etc). The film (bulk of the shoot) is being developed... Very excited to see those. :-)

5

Hello! I'm back from the scorching heat of summer-time Germany and ecstatic to have received a memory stick containing images from a shoot I did with Norwegian photographer Sjur Roald in May. This was such a fantastic day; five dance-y models (two full-time dancers, one singer, a model and a model/writer) all combining in one studio (The Cottage Studio in Sussex) to produce some varying states of entanglement and drama. It is always so much fun to work alongside other models and I want to say a big thank you to Sjur for making it happen; it's not easy (or indeed particularly inexpensive) to coordinate the whereabouts of six different people, and I'm so glad this came together. I think Sjur did an amazing job!

The four other models are: Gem, Samantha, Gestalta and Fiona.

Click to view the files larger.

It was right after this shoot that I went to shoot 'La Source, River Adur' with Jeremy Howitt. That was a good day!

Any favourites?

Heavenly Stairways

Iceland was amazing. I can't wait to tell you (and show you) all about it!!

In the meantime, though, and before I jet off to Germany, I want to show you these, courtesy of Ian Parry aka Maximus Operandi. He has taken some incredibly idyllic, romantic images and I really love the shots we did.

My travel plans are getting more and more exciting as I go on; I've just added arrangements to Norway and Italy to the mix for the next couple of months! I am disgustingly lucky. :-)

In other news, I have mostly been designing customised converse trainers (how can I ever decide on the final design??? Arrghh!!) and admiring this incredible, wonderful lady.

Enjoy your hot weekends!

Locks and Leaves

As practically everyone who's ever met me will know, I am not at my best when packing for trips away. Obviously, I'm very excited about the trips that I get to do, and packing now takes me a lot less time than the 2-3 days it used to take me when I was younger (yes, seriously, I would spend days upon days arranging about 5000 outfits on the floor and pondering the possibilities for a one-week trip to Majorca, or Tenerife, or wherever it was we were going as a family). I'm quite good at understanding the idea that outfits can be worn more than once on a trip, now, thank God; not to mention that I don't need to allow for five or so 'options' per day. 

Still, a few of the more mundane things I did today instead of packing: 

- hoovering (though to an extent I actually don't mind hoovering)

- ironing (I hate ironing with a passion - almost as much as I hate packing, except that it makes me angrier, so this didn't help me much in any way other than ensuring I don't turn up looking like a wreck but instead have vaguely neat clothes - which will for the most part not be worn anyway because nudes look rubbish with dresses on)
- napping (only very briefly, but it felt right...)

- answering emails (very productive, eh?) 

In the end, packing has taken me very little time (though, admittedly, I have paused mid-pack, for tradition's sake) since I am now fairly close to nailing the skills of a good friend of mine in Vancouver who I once watched spend roughly three minutes breezily picking up a few choice items from her room and depositing them into a tiny bag for a trip we did to Seattle/San Francisco (while I looked on in absolute awe), but really, it's times like these I wish I was more of a minimalist, or just less of a 'Oooh, I might want to use this thing I never ever use and definitely won't need but might not be able to buy out there' person! 

So, now that I've got the 'middle class problem' of 'Oh, damn I have to pack for Iceland' out the way, I might as well mention something else I caught myself saying out loud a couple of weeks ago. I was trying to show a friend some countries on a map (don't ask; the friend shall remain anonymous) but failed to reach the globe easily enough to swizzle it around, so I then tried to show her on another globe in a different room but failed to locate the plug to switch the globe's light on, since the corner of the room it was in is quite dark... (I'm realising as I type this that I'm struggling with telling this story and am going to just give up and get straight to the 'punch line' (see no.5 of 'Very British Problems' here): basically I ended up blurting out in frustration, 'Urgh, all my globes are so awkwardly placed!'. I think that would qualify for being on that 'middle class problems' buzzfeed, maybe. I embarrass myself so much with the utter drivel that comes out of my mouth sometimes. 

ANYWAY, that was all a completely unnecessary (and probably really boring - sorry!) detour from the fact that I am updating my blog (not packing) quickly before I go away on this next trip, to tide over anyone who likes looking at it. The following images were taken by Steven Bruce, whose photography I love (and who also did these with me), in a Californian garden where I modelled alongside Meghan, who has also featured on this blog a few times before, because she is, to use an Americanism, awesome.