Backstage: A Diary of Summer

I had a wonderful shoot on Tuesday with my lovely, talented Alicia Mew MakeUp and my crazy little stylist Shu Han Kelly Huang in Ruislip Lido. Our models were the lovelyAnya Avonrims from Profile Model Management and Emma Frances Hodgson from MandP Models. Anna has the most amazing porcelain skin and the craziest curly red hair with the biggest deep blue eyes I have seen in a while. Emma is only 15 and has the greatest body with the loveliest hair.

We had a "last days of summer" shoot and it indeed was. We chased ducks with wind in our hair and sunshine in our breath.We danced in the lake and rolled around in sand. It was a gorgeous day. We all travelled to a distant magical land across the water.We climbed onto fences, shooed nasty giant spiders, ran into the lake...As I was dipping my feet in water with my skirt pulled up Emma was bravely laying in it and I was digging my toes into the wet sand as the girls were running splashing water everywhere.

We drank cups and cups of hot chocolate and asked a drunk stranger who turned out to be a photographer to take a picture of us at the end of the day. We were worn out but our smiles were still glued to our faces.

Thank you everyone for a wonderful shoot and being such troopers. x

Backstage: Moonlight of the Fractured Minds

Yesterday I had an amazing shoot in Hackney with the lovely stylist Cyra Alcock who is beyond talented, my great MUA Alicia Mew MakeUp who I am starting to look like am holding hostage for every shoot and "reflector guy" my lovely boy Kemal Kurtsoy(hihihi:). It was very different and edgy for me and it all started because Cyra wanted to play around with some extra cloths she had from a recent shoot.


We had two lovely models. Flossy who is a dancer and has been modelling for a short amount of time with the most amazing hair when she walked in for the casting I exclaimed "Hair envy!' and Lettice who only modelled once before this shoot who has the most gorgeous eyes and the porcelain skin I have ever seen. We chat and gossiped and ate wonderful quiche that Cyra made from scratch. (Thank you Cyra it was the most delicious thing ever.)

Flossy and Lettice ran around with plum lips and crazy wedges while their hair danced in the wind. There were burnt tires and graffiti with crazy monkeys. Also bags of poo (no not kidding there really were not in the shoot but right next to us -_-), a random vial of blood (not for the shoot again just sitting there ewwww) and passers-by who made weird noises whenever.


I forgot to take a team picture as usual though :( I remembered it after we were done on our way to the Louis De Gama studio and Kem snapped a pic on Alicia's phone at the bus stop. So here we are again in a crappy picture above *sighs* 

And more from the shoot 

charlotte.

I had a lovely client shoot for Charlotte Pusey. My lovely team included Shu Han Kelly Huang and Alicia Schutte. Charlie's dad, Kelly's cousin and my boy helped us. We ran around the streets of Oakwood, danced around parking lots, sat on the pavement eating Snaps (which lovely Charlie brought for the team), been stared at by everyone and had the most "interesting" conversations with the most random passerby that kept coming back. I am so happy to have found such a great team and wonderful friends :) This isn't the best photo ever and was shot in "idiot mode" named by Charlie's dad who took it but this is us :) x

Backstage: Entwined Hearts

        Hello everyone,

How is everything going? Hope you re all having a great summer . :)

We had a lovely but very hard shoot on the 30th of May with lovely Elinor from Tess Management and Gesche from D1 Models as our lovely ladies in the forest. With Maya Lewis as the MUA and Natalie Dale as the stylist.

This shoot started out to be something completely different. I don't know why but most of my shoots don't go according to plan lately. First the stylist cancelled two days ago but thanks to Natalie saving the day we still managed to shoot. Our second problem was with our second model. WIth our first stylist cancelling we waited too long for confirmations and our first four choices were not available. So over all all the clothing and the models changed.

We have some lovely results from the shoot nonetheless. The idea was for me to try something with movement and ambience rather than crowd the scene with props. It was hard but fruitful :)

        The weather was awful on top of this. I was praying for it not to rain but learnt I should pray for no strong wind so my lights are safe and my poor assistant doesn't need to learn how to stop herself from flying. Also a partially sunny day with strong wind = sun one second, overcast the other, It was a pain to shoot!

      My models were lovely however. I think as much as they froze they had the most fun running around barefoot, spinning, laying on trees. Elinor is a lovely 18 year old model who has been modelling for 3 years. She has the most vibrant laugh and the friendliest attitude. I love her eyes. We already talked about arranging for me to go to Bath where she lives and take pictures with hot air balloons :) Gesche is a lovely German girl with amazing hair and porcelain white skin. I wish the styling suited her better because she is so gorgeous and I feel like I didn't do her beauty any justice.

        As for the intended shoot, I will be shooting that when I'm back in London August.

       Sadly I don't have many backstage shots for this shoot since Alejandra forgot her camera but here are the ones I took.

Making of: Daydreams of Lost and Found

Hello,

How has everyone been? I have been a busy bee shooting and shooting after over a year of doing nothing. This is going to be one of the many "Making Of" posts I will be doing about the shoots I am doing. I will go through the planning period to the props to the team to the shoot itself for the ones that are interested.

I have been getting a lot of questions about how the process goes so I figured a full on "How was it done?" entry would satisfy the questions better. I will do my best to keep these up for every shoot I do from now on. Also I will most likely be doing some backstage of the backstage and prop building as well. I don't know how long my camera can record though :)

With the flowers blooming for spring and the heavy showers combined with the daydreams I am having I got inspired to do something. With all that inspiration going on I figured why not try a spring editorial.

A few days after me getting all worked up about shooting because I became frustrated for not doing anything for so long I woke up to a beautiful sunny London day. I just had to go out and lay on the grass. My two lovely dorm friends Jess and Nat decided to come out and chill as well. I grabbed my covers and walked out in pjs. That's how it all started. I sat there watching the clouds and scribbling ideas whislt Jess was practicing her singing. Here is how we looked :)



Here is me daydreaming and smoking is bad kids! :)



My massive sketchbook.



"Look at me mommy! I can draw stick figures when I haz ideas!"



On my left lovely Jess with her gorgeous voice and giggly Nat on my right with her amazing dimples.


So I sat down wrote all my ideas and ran back in to research. I always research prices for prop building before finding the team as I never know how long it will take me to get the items or if I can afford them. Makes it less likely I would have to postpone things and ruin some good connections in the process. (Yes I have done that mistake in the past :))


PROPS

Finding the Items for the Props/The Buying Spree


After making the huge list of ideas (10 shots as I was looking to submit this and wanted a variety) and writing down what I need for the props I went on to research.

The mini list of items to get.

As the shoot was mainly based on flowers being everywhere I went on to ebay and started searching for fake flowers first. I learnt a valuable lesson you get better results when you use fancy words as artificial :) You can find some good deals on Ebay but at the end of the day with me wanting to cover so many things in flowers it ended up being way too expensive. A few days later I got the idea of maybe I would be able to find wholesale places that did artificial ones. And I was definitely right. Global Flowers UK is a very good place to look if you are looking to get some good artificial ones. Some look quite fake of course but I was fairly satisfied with them. As much as it seemed cheaper after a bit I got tempted to check real wholesale flowers and came across Triangle Nursery UK who does wholesale flowers and delivers them to your door in one day so they are fresh.

Water lilies however are a challenge to find. I finally found one seller on ebay that sent them from Hong Kong and tried to rip me off for 150 gbp of shipping -_- I did go all bitchy and said I wont pay if she doesn't reduce the price and it worked! :)This is how my room looked when they arrived with the headpieces and I was like a kid in Christmas morning.



After sorting where I can find flowers I started googling for the pieces I wanted to cover like the umbrella etc.

Than it was ofc left to the last minute. The backstage post explains the loving moments I had with flowers and the glue that I had to pick from m hair for about a week.


CREATIVE TEAM

For such a big shoot working with new people was going to be a huge bet. However I had no choice as I am new in this city and I dont have that many steady team members. Also I need to find a new assistant so it was casting time! There are two good sites you can use for finding new people. There are some beginners but it is like flea markets, if you look hard enough you find some amazing people. One site is the good old ModelMayhem which I often use for MUAs and stylists. To be honest I wasn't expecting such a big turn out but I got a great amount of interest from some amazing people. Here is my very simple casting call as I was looking for testing in general for these few months Looking for Creatives to Test With and got these amazing people April to June Tests

I chose Lynn Huang for my stylist after a brief chat and realizing we have the same favorite photographers. Here is some of her lovely work :)





After she has done some research we got together in Camden to go through my ideas and her styling ones. It was nice to see we were on the same page. Also we had a nice chat over coffee and she seemed lovely.

MODELS

I always search through websites such as MM before going to agencies as I really like building lasting personal bonds with the models but in this case I wasn't lucky. Now before everyone gets their knickers in a twist you can actually get models for test for free for agencies which most people don't realize. Just ring them up and ask if they have any new faces that need the experience and the exposure, show them your portfolio and voila. Most will say yes and give you amazing young women you can learn together with. And if you test enough with them you can even start shooting with them, Some agencies I have been shooting with and are amazingly nice are Profile-Models, Zone-ModelsMandP Models...

For this shoot I needed a young model that had that innocent look that captivates you as soon as you look at her. So i looked through their cast picked some names, gave them the basic details of the shoot and emailed them. Gave follow up calls as most agencies get loads of emails and even though they know me it is faster to let them know by phone as well.They got back to me with who is available from who I picked and more for me to pick from.


We contacted 14 agencies who sent us something around 78 girls at the last count. Because it is a two day shoot it wasn't as easy this time. D1 sent an amazing selection but nobody really fit the bill exactly. Profile Model Management said girls can only do one day so we weren't so enthusiastic about that. I didn't like the models Oxygen sent. Also the ones Bookings sent as amazing as they were didn't fit the look. By the third day of casting I started panicking on the model issue. I had seen some amazing girls I would love to shoot but none of them fit what I wanted. That's the problem of a very specific feel you want of a model.

In the end even though D1s models didn't fit what I had in mind I couldn't resist how lovely dear Hannah was and I have to say I am very content i couldn't. She was such a delightful creature and fun to work with. Don't need to even mention how gorgeous she was :)


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So this was the before of the process for the day before the shoot and the shoot days jump onto the Backstage post.

It is the first ever process blog I tried to make so bare with me while I get used to this :)

x