Green

Miss Flame and I once more (STILL more to come; I'm going through them slowly). Photographer Mark Bigelow.

The iPhone and the Cello

When I was contacted by Gordon Fraser for a booking, two things struck me as particularly interesting about his proposal. Firstly, he wanted to take photographs of me using nothing but the camera on his iPhone (no Nikon? No Canon? What a maverick!) and, secondly, he wanted me to pose with a cello that would shortly afterwards be thrown from either a roof or the window of a four-storey building.

We shot, for the iPhone project, in a village hall. Any photographer who has used one of these for a shoot before will know of the distinct challenges they come with (the most basic of which being the almost inevitable lack of a featureless wall to use as a backdrop), but Gordon made excellent use of the surroundings. See how cool the floor looks in the shots below!

Here are a few from the day..... All captured and processed within the iPhone.

Cello:



Movement (some taken while I held a hip shimmy for motion blur only in that area):


Tutu:


And finally, some nudes. I really love the angles and warmth to these as well as the lighting and the slightly mottled effect on the skin in some of them:



Thanks Gordon!

P.S. HAVE JUST UPDATED THE GALLERIES ON MY WEBSITE. GO SEE!

You think it's just a normal day...

... Just hanging out in the studio with Mark Bigelow, standing on one leg, playing with shapes and silhouettes against an azure sky, merrily enjoying the space and the urge to explore the possibilities of oriental fingers...

Little (until afterwards) do you realise a little Ivory Flame-shaped ninja floating into the scene and hovering quietly behind you, ominously gravity-defying and waiting to pounce. This is actually how she entered the studio, you may assume.

(Dear Holly: This is the image I was talking about today.)



Seconds later, I got my own back (kind of):



Fun times!


... And still a LOT more to come from different sets.

This might sound immediately weird to anyone who doesn't know instantly what I'm talking about, but some of these images remind me, for some reason, of little sand pictures of lizards I once bought in Tenerife.

Flashdance...

Some new ones from a shoot with photographer Jeff Steed:


I rather like my glowing bum in the last.

:-)

Sisters doing it for themselves!

I expect this will be the first of quite a few blog posts from a full day shoot with Ivory Flame, photographer Mark Bigelow and assistant photographer Andy Proper at Cheltenham Film Studios. Mark and I have been working on a project on Rosamund Clifford for a while now (you may have read about this before, if you're a loyal reader!) and when he asked me who I would suggest could play my sister, the wonderful Ivory Flame came immediately to mind. It was a brilliant day of creation and experimentation. Mark was very much of the attitude that he would set up the lights, the background and the space (the size of the studio always makes it great to prance around in), and then 'record' what happened. The freedom this gave us to play and explore shapes together was so much fun, and Ivory Flame was a pleasure to work with. Our bodies and shapes (and styles) are distinct but work so well together; in some of the shots I have to peer closely to see who is who. I've just picked three shots to show for now:

Blushing Bride

I had a quick bridal shoot in Oxford with photographer Tony McCawley, recently. He wanted some bridal images for his business and I thought it was about time I had some photographs in that style for my agency and portfolio, so was glad to receive some images from Tony after the shoot. I'm not the type of girl who has spent her entire life dreaming of a white wedding, but it was certainly fun to play the part for a couple of hours in a very pretty dress. :-)

A few of my favourites:

Adriadne and the Golden Thread

I modelled recently for Marc Burgess for part of his project on Adriadne and the Golden Thread. I remember going to Crete when I was very young, and being fascinated by this labyrinth and the minataur it held. A bit of background on Minos from http://www.pantheon.org/articles/m/minos.html:

The legendary king of Crete, son of Zeus and the Phoenician princess Europa. Minos and his two brothers, Rhadamanthys and Sarpedon, were raised in the royal palace of Cnossus. Minos married Pasiphae, daughter of the sun-god Helios. Some of their children were Phaedra, Ariadne, and Andregeos.

In mythology, a dispute over the sovereignty of Crete led Minos to ask Poseidon for help. He asked the god to send an offering as a sign of his true kingship. The god of the sea sent a gleaming pure white bull, which emerged miraculously from the waves. This confirmed to all concerned that Minos was their true king. However, as soon as King Minos saw this magnificent beast he refused to sacrifice it to Poseidon, and replaced it with another. Poseidon in retaliation sent Pasiphae into uncontrollable lust for this huge beast. So much so that she had the urge to mate with this huge animal. To do this she requested the help of Daedalus, a craftsman and inventor, who built a hollow wooden cow. Pasiphae hid inside, the amorous bull mounted the wooden cow and as a result Pasiphae conceived its child, or rather a creature which was half man and half bull, which became known as the Minotaur (Minotauros, "the bull of Minos").

King Minos ordered Daedalus to construct a palace to hide the Minotaur, and Daedalus built Labyrinth. Because of his meddling Minos imprisoned Daedalus and his son Icarus inside a tower. They escaped by making wings from wax and feathers, but Icarus was killed when he flew to close to the sun.

When Androgeos, the son of King Minos, attended the games in Athens he was victorious in all events, but was murdered through envy by other contestants. Minos then attacked Athens to avenge the death of Androgeos, and, after gaining control of the city he granted Athens peace, but with one condition: that every nine years Athens should send seven of their finest young men and young maidens to Crete, as sacrifice to the Minotaur. When the hero Theseus heard about this practice, he volunteered to be one of the victims, killing the Minotaur, and freeing Athens from this grizzly duty.

Well, as they say, behind every successful man is a very clever woman. Minos' daughter, Adriadne, happened to fall in love with Theseus and had the good thinking to give him a ball of string (or golden thread), so that he could find his way back out of the labyrinth. Apparently, she told him 'go forwards, always down and never left or right', which I find baffling, frankly, but nevermind... All went to plan, and they would have lived happily ever after, I imagine, had Dionysus not told Theseus he'd already chosen Adriadne for himself, and that Theseus should just abandon her on the island of Naxos. Harsh. This had a whole load of other consequences; curses, sails changing from black to white, suicide... Greek mythology is never ending.

ANYWAY, Marc and I had a very quick shoot, and I mean very quick (one hour) in my local studio, and technical problems at the beginning meant there was even less time to channel Adriadne than there might have been and that Marc was, in the end, worried he hadn't done me justice. In fact, I think the technical 'flaws' in these images, if you would call them that, which I personally wouldn't(!), make the shots very characterful and interesting. All the more so knowing we had such little time. Marc will be creating a painting from the results, which I very much look forward to seeing.