Pink dress

I've admired Gary Sandy's photography for a while, having seen lots of his beautiful, glowy new work popping up on my facebook newsfeed every now and then, and we'd communicated over the last couple of years about shooting together. Last month we managed to get a date together and do some fashion/commercial/look book-style stuff! I wanted to look 'fresh' and youthful and just a little different from my usual, dreamy, romantic style - we thought we might do some quirky/contemporary make up for some of the shots, but the make up artist scheduled to come along didn't make it in the end, so I had to do it myself and the shoot nearly didn't go ahead at all (the weather was forecast to be terrible, so we were texting each other at around 3am, trying to work out whether to do the shoot or not)! Anyway, because of this last minute confusion, the photoshoot ended up being quite a quick one, but Gary is great to work with, didn't mind me carrying my mug of tea outside with us at his farm (I'm the slowest tea-drinker in the world), and I hope we get to do something together again at some point.

Below are some shots from one of the outfits/sets we did. There will be more, but I'm too keen to show these off already! The dress was kindly provided by Gary.

August is my last full month of modelling in the UK, then I'm off modelling and backpacking around various places on the globe intermittently until mid-December! At the moment, I'm not completely sure what I'll be doing next year and I probably won't know until Christmas time-ish, but if I'm still modelling I hope I get to do more stuff like this!

...And here's another one Gary's just edited... 'The lynx effect':

Hope you like them!

'How I became a madman'

...and other quotes/poems I've enjoyed recently... (Did I mention my obsession with appearance versus reality? Yes? Good.)

Kahlil Gibran:

'You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen -- the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives, -- I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, "Thieves, thieves, the curséd thieves."

Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me.

And when I reached the market place, a youth standing on a house-top cried, "He is a madman." I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time. For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, "Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks."

Thus I became a madman.

And I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.

But let me not be too proud of my safety. Even a Thief in a jail is safe from another thief.'

Oprah Winfrey (yes, this blog post is pretty varied):

'I know for sure that what we dwell on is who we become.'

Oscar Wilde:

'Most people are other people; their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.... Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.'

(Photograph by Imagesse; proper blog post with many landscape nudes to follow soon!)

Three more from Ravenshaw

By Rebecca Parker:

and a headshot by Tim Pile:

Faerie Queen

My new website is finally online!

Ta da!!!!
www.ellarosemuse.co.uk

It's by no means finished and I already have a LOT of brand new photos to add to it, bits and pieces to edit and sort out and general perfectionism-type tweaking and tampering to do (I also really need to work out how to make the contact form work!), but I decided it was silly to wait until some magical moment when it became 'perfect' before uploading it, as a) people keep asking me where my website is, and b) there will never come such a moment. I also intend to update it fairly regularly, so it will always be a work in progress in a sense.

The beautiful image on my homepage was created by Pat Brennan of www.moonmomma.co.uk. I was absolutely blown away when I saw her interpreation of a photograph of me taken by Keith Cooper. I had waffled to her vaguely about the possibility of something twinkly and unique, having admired her enchanted style for a long time, and she knew exactly what to do. I couldn't be more thrilled and grateful! Go and visit her website if you haven't already!

 I have twelve individual, themed galleries on my new website. Please go and check it out!

The following shots, taken by Rebecca Parker (Moonmomma's daughter!) at Ravenshaw, near Birmingam, will go into the 'Faerie' gallery. Becky came along to a shoot I did with Tim Pile and also did the make up for me here (and the headdressing).

(Tangent: I was so inspired by Becky's incredible, enormous make up palettes... again... that I've just gone and ordered my own from ebay. There's a Hong Kong based shop on there which does the most incredible range of professional quality make up at incredibly cheap prices. I am so excited, having just ordered 96 colourful eyeshadows in a range of shimmer/matte textures, 88 nude/brown eyeshadows, 66 lip colours and 28 blushers. Considering how slimline and light the palettes are, with their glossy lids with mirrors inside, this will, believe it or not, probably weigh less than my current more mis-fitting make up collection, and possibly even take up less space.) I absolutely love having my make up done by other people, not because I'm not skilled at it (I'm pretty good at it, having had years of experience doing it on myself), but because it's always interesting to see what choices other people make when considering your face and colouring. I would never think to use peach eyeshadow on myself as I generally suit cooler tones better than warm ones, but Becky made it look incredible.

Tim and Becky are good friends and often shoot together nowadays; I think they make an excellent team. Their complementary approaches mean they can help each other consider fresh ideas without overlapping too much and getting the same images. Becky is interested in portraiture and beauty (amongst other things), focussing on the emotion and expression of the model, while Tim has a wonderful eye for the larger picture, spotting locations with eye-catching potential and using shapes and perspectives to create a scene in which the model can insert herself. They are both great to work with and the location, a peaceful never-ending garden with bridges, lakes, reeds was simply beautiful. Such a relaxing place to be in. 

Anyway, I very much hope to be able to show some images from Tim soon, to show what I mean, but, for now (finally, I'm getting to the evidence) here are some from Becky which show me as a bit of a faerie queen. :)

:-)

Ghost & Grapes

I love images which show movement blur - to be honest I've never been a huge fan of the 'stop motion' school of photography. I much prefer to move around like a mad thing and hope some kind of shutter release makes some kind of cool ghostliness happen. The following (very experimental) images were taken as part of the second shoot I did with Keith Cooper at Cheltenham Film Studios. I think they're really cool - I'm barely even in some of them, so they're nice and 'anonymous'. I love the bright freshness and vibrancy of the colours in the first few, then the muted, soft, pale hues in the second lot. The piece of silk fabric I'd brought along (hand-dyed from Cairo, dontchya know) looks a bit like flames, flying up in sultry licks.

Here we are then:

We also did some Roman/Greek/Latin-esque images against a be-lettered piece of fabric Keith had brought along to use as a background, avec grapes and some of my be-coined dance pieces. A productive shoot!

 

Irreality

I had a very interesting shoot with photographer Barry Barker recently. We shot in his home studio, its walls covered in photographs and artistry. Barry is inspired by various artists and wanted to create some soft boudoir images, like this one...

...and then some more surreal body shapes using a mirror on the floor and his clever background, painted on the wall and floor of his studio den, to create interesting shapes and perspectives. The colour nudes are taken with a fish eye lens. (Good job I don't mind being distorted; this wide-angle, hemispherical lens makes everything a little 'surreal', with any body part which comes close to the camera look enormous! Hence my hand, feet and knee in the colour shots below...)

 It was really fun to move around the mirror, bending and twisting and making weird shapes to be exaggerated by the lens. I really enjoyed it and Barry also took some on film (the monochrome shots below) which I think work really well too.

All I want

Rebecca Parker has sent me a new image from our shoot last year. :-)

'All I want' by Joni Mitchell:

I am on a lonely road and I am traveling
Traveling, traveling, traveling
Looking for something, what can it be
Oh I hate you some, I hate you some
I love you some
Oh I love you when I forget about me
I want to be strong I want to laugh along
I want to belong to the living
Alive, alive, I want to get up and jive
I want to wreck my stockings in some juke box dive
Do you want - do you want - do you want
To dance with me baby
Do you want to take a chance
On maybe finding some sweet romance with me baby
Well, come on

All I really really want our love to do
Is to bring out the best in me and in you too
All I really really want our love to do
Is to bring out the best in me and in you
I want to talk to you, I want to shampoo you
I want to renew you again and again
Applause, applause - life is our cause
When I think of your kisses
My mind see-saws
Do you see - do you see - do you see
How you hurt me baby
So I hurt you too
Then we both get so blue

I am on a lonely road and I am traveling
Looking for the key to set me free
Oh the jealousy, the greed is the unraveling
It's the unraveling
And it undoes all the joy that could be
I want to have fun, I want to shine like the sun
I want to be the one that you want to see
I want to knit you a sweater
Want to write you a love letter
I want to make you feel better
I want to make you feel free
Hmm, Hmm, Hmm, Hmm,
Want to make you feel free
I want to make you feel free

Joni, the 'universal treasure' is occupying all my head space at the moment. For fans, here's a video of her in 1970, singing 'All I want' as she was still creating it - amazing how different the officially released version is from the video below. It was originally about a specific break up ('All I wanted our love to do' instead of 'All I want our love to do', etc). So moving.

I only really got into Joni Mitchell 2 or 3 years ago when I happened to hear 'Carey' on the radio. I almost had to stop the car to listen - I recognised it immediately as being something I'd heard a local folk singer Fiona Simpson (whose name has also stuck unusually in my head) sing at a country pub in Chalgrove, Oxfordshire, where I used to live, and prayed my head off that the radio DJ would announce the name of the singer at the end - I had no idea it was Joni Mitchell, who I knew of but hadn't really listened to before. I must have been about 5 or 6 when i heard Fiona Simpson sing 'Carey', so it's pretty incredible that I recognised the melody on the radio so clearly from a childhood memory - a testament to the brilliance of the song. 'The wind is in from Africa, last night I couldn't sleep, you know it sure is hard to leave here Carey, but it's really not my home...'. All her lyrics are such vivid stories full of details and life. A wonderful woman who's done so much for music.

A day in the studio...

... with Carl Grim and Hannah Ashlea. Both are such a pleasure to work with. I know by now (after multiple shoots) what to expect from Carl - massive amounts of energy, ideas and verve. He came with a list of ideas and a bag full of props. Hannah is someone I'm totally comfortable working with and a thoroughly lovely person. Our figures are quite different, which makes for an interesting combination, and I LOVE her current hair colour (as I keep telling her, gushingly). While I'm 'plugging', I do love working at WhiteSpaceStudios in Chesham. It's a great, versatile space and Pete, the studio owner is very friendly and helpful.

Right, here we go:

The rope shots have got to be my favourite - they were so cool to do. Jumping is fun.