Red Swan

Today was long and hot and busy, but really good too.

I got up pretty early this morning and headed into the city to do some birthday shopping with Ella. We were looking for a present for Charlie, who is turning 21 tomorrow, and as I'm writing this blip a few days after the event I can say that we spent most of our time in T2 making a list of things for Julia to purchase with her handy employee discount! After figuring out the gift and the card and wrappings we had a quick hot chocolate before I rushed off to the bank and then back home to await Julia.

For ages I've had all these ideas for shoots and, luckily, Julia has been as excited as I am to try some of them - it was hard at first to actually decide on just one idea but I'm really pleased with how it all turned out despite a bit of a rocky start. We decided to play around with some face paint, but I've never really used face paint on someone else before so my first attempt made Julia look like a superhero - awesome but not what I was after! I managed to fix it, though, and we were able to head down to the place I'd scouted out yesterday. Julia seemed totally fine wandering around with bright red paint on her face, and as I was laden down with two cameras I think it was pretty obvious to everyone what we were doing.

When we started the shoot I realised that sometimes what's in your head doesn't end up on the camera but having now seen the end results I think I did get what I wanted. It's all just a learning process - it's not just using the camera well, it's being able to communicate to the model what you want and making sure you're clear but not, like, mean about the instructions. And it's about readjusting according to the conditions - the sun was directly overhead when we were shooting and it was creating annoying shadows, so I had to think about how to combat that - mostly, I got Julia to tilt her head up to the sun, and towards the end I had her on her back in the grass and I think some of those are the coolest photos because her hair is all spread out around her head. Anyway, all in all I'm pleased with how it went and what I ended up with - especially on the OM-2!

After such a busy day I basically collapsed on the sofa because I could hardly move my legs. So much walking!

Apart from maybe two out of focus photos, all the shots I took on the OM-2 today are awesome. I'm so pleased and I'm so proud - I know literally nothing about film photography and I was assuming they'd all be over exposed or something. It was actually really hard to pick a blip but this one just keeps popping out at me - it's exactly the kind of photo I wanted from this shoot so I'm really glad I achieved that. Major thanks to Julia for doing this!