Cascading Light

ERWhittington 4 Comments

A tiny update, rushed before I go away on my date with Belgium tomorrow; don’t mind if I do indulge in a few chocolates while I’m there..! So looking forward to this first visit (I don’t think driving through on the way to Germany as a child counts).

These were all taken at a workshop run by Trevor and Faye Yerbury (well, except the bicycle one, but it seems fitting)…. soooo lovely, I reckon.

and by Ian:

Lilies and Vanity

ERWhittington 2 Comments

Hallo! I modelled for the following images in Dusseldorf a while ago with photographer Vernon Trent – a mixture of film and polaroid. So nice to see the results, and I can’t wait for my next trip to Deustschland! Vernon and his lovely lady friend were very nice to work with, and I have always found Vernon’s photography beautiful. 🙂

I really like the fifth shot.

Also, I recently wrote an article about ‘vanity’ in the context of modelling. (Loyal blog readers might recognise some of the content.) It was published a couple of days ago on the front page of Model Mayhem, and had a great reaction. I was expecting some snarky comments along the lines of ‘why does she think we’d want to read about that… Who is she anyway?’ etc; forum reactions are unpredictable (and I have experience of this from writing for the Guardian; you get such a mix!)! But I have survived and am pleased to know that people are relating to what I say in great numbers. Over on the facebook page of MM it’s had a crazy amount of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’, and I’ve had some really nice messages about it. I have no idea if non-members of Model Mayhem can read the article, so here it is in full, for the record:


Recently, a friend I hadn’t seen in about five years asked me whether, doing what I do, I ever feel caught up in the concept of physical appearance. I replied that, actually, I think I’m far less vain these days than I ever might have been and somehow manage to ignore the media obsession with “perfection” and “irreality” almost completely. So, here are some scattered thoughts on the subject…

Model: Ella Rose; Photographer: Max Operandi
Vanity
When it comes to modelling, I have a mental list of things I’m not interested in doing. It’s the closest I have to “terms and conditions,” I suppose. For example, I won’t knowingly wear real fur. I won’t take part in anything I deem potentially offensive (religiously or politically). I won’t pose in ways I feel are overtly sexual or gratuitously explicit. It’s a pretty standard little list (I realize these things are quite subjective, but that’s largely the point), except for one thing I include: “vanity.”
Despite the fact that my images are often described as “pretty,” “soft,” or “romantic,” and despite the fact that I recently responded to a flattering comment with the words “Don’t forget I only show the pretty ones,” I am not scared of looking unpolished, “imperfect,” or “unpretty.” This is what I mean by saying that I don’t want to do “vanity.” I am interested in emotion and expression – and HONESTY. This means I’m not afraid to explore the areas of humanity which aren’t so pleasing to the eye. (I’m rarely taken up on this, but that’s OK.) I’m also happy to be completely unphotoshopped in photos (and often am). I’m totally happy with my body, which is completely different from subscribing to the idea that it is “perfect”–it isn’t–for example, my bones are such that I will always be pear-shaped. Which brings me to…
Self-awareness
Self-awareness is the thing. I’m aware of my strengths and my weaknesses. I’m aware of angles which make me look good and angles which definitely don’t. I have a massive amount of body awareness. I can isolate muscles most people don’t know they have. One of the things recommended to new models who want to “learn to pose” is to practice in front of a mirror. I confess I’ve actually never ever done this, but I usually have a good idea of exactly what a pose is going to look like. I think this is to do with my dance background more than anything, and then also from noticing what works and what doesn’t when I’ve looked at the images after a shoot. It’s always fun to see the images on the back of the camera during a shoot, as you can see how the lighting is working for what you’re doing, what kind of crops/compositions are happening, and what’s going on in the background. But what I mean is this: I generally have a good idea of how to work with my strengths. I’m aware that I’m not perfect, but I’m also aware that I can look good, and that I’m lucky to have a healthy body which functions well and does what I ask of it, so I think it would be a bit hideous of me to complain or worry. I think this realization, along with my modelling, has made me completely comfortable and happy in my own skin, so much so that vanity isn’t even an issue.

Model: Ella Rose; Photographer: Iain Thomson
As well as my body, I also have a lot more self knowledge about my face, and confidence about which angles work best for it. Seeing your face on camera repeatedly means that such awareness is unavoidable (even if I did only realize the other day that I can raise one eyebrow); I can also recognize a few of my fellow model friends only by a tiny part of one of their features. There is a detachment that comes alongside such intimate knowledge, which is essential for modelling. At the beginning, when shown a picture of myself during a shoot, I would comment on the angles or proportions of “my legs,” or “my chin,” whereas now I am equally likely to say “the legs,” or “the chin,” which sometimes makes photographers smile. (Just the other day I was looking at a shot of myself in a two-pose double exposure and, pointing at one of ‘the figures’ said “I like that she is actually touching the other person,” which is extra weird, thinking about it.) Anyway, before I talk myself into an existential crisis, here’s the crux of it: while knowing their body and face so well, good models must simultaneously become more objective about what image is being presented via the camera; I can now see myself as a sequence of shapes putting forward an overall mood or expression. And such knowledge is inevitable, when pictures of yourself are thrust at you so often; after all, the camera, consistent to the end, doesn’t lie.

Model: Ella Rose; Photographer: Jewelled World
It’s possible to pose so much, for example for eight full days in a row, that when you get home you find yourself noticing the way your cat is sprawled out on the grass outside and think, “Oh, good pose; nice shape; good leg angle.” At these times, you wonder if you’re more than a little mad, but that’s OK. I know at least two people who pose in their sleep. (Incidentally, I always appreciate people who, like me, sit weirdly without noticing, just because it’s comfortable, with legs stretched or curled in unexpected possibilities. I get particularly creative in the cinema.)
In some ways, I am probably less vain now than before I started modelling. I wasn’t massively vain then either, but I worried more about what people thought of my appearance, which in my opinion is closer to the true definition of vanity. I remember the first time I got on a train for a shoot with zero make up on (as I only had time to do it on the train). My younger self would have found this perversely exciting, a sort of thrill, but mostly terrifying, since people would see my ACTUAL FACE. I now realize that A) I really don’t look different without make up on, it’s just that my features aren’t “enhanced,” and B) even if I did look rough, gross, half-dead, etc. (although see “A”), absolutely no one would care or even notice. It’s silly to think that they would. I’m just another stranger in the street, not out to impress anyone, and that’s fun.

Model: Ella Rose; Photographer: Rebecca Parker
I have always thought that most people are beautiful if you look at them properly. What’s beautiful to me is character and a person’s story. If you can see that in the way they hold themselves, in little details about their manner and in the movements they make with their unique features and structures– if they have grace, kindness, un-selfconscious openness, an endearing awkwardness, stress, fear, vulnerability, humor, slight hints of emotion, history–the things which make up a life and leave traces on their physicality, then a person holds massive interest for me. There will always be “bad” photos of me existing out there in the unforgiving world of the internet, and sometimes these can simply be learned from, but maybe the truly “Zen” model would not fear them so much as understand that, just occasionally, “imperfection,” when coupled with self-confidence, can make a shot.

….And soon I’m getting around to looking at some questions I’ve had posed to me for an interview for an excellent website, getting ready to let loose on some more of my thoughts about this modelling business… Such a compliment to be asked, and you just can’t shut me up at the moment.

Curves & Refraction

ERWhittington 6 Comments

Whooooosshh!!

That’s the sound of me zooming through my emails, obviously. I am really terrible at keeping on top of them and frequently tell myself off about it (though I have been told I’m not as bad as some!), but have made a good dent this evening (got some lovely ones, too, including being asked to be interviewed for an upcoming feature) and may even carry on for a while after a quick detour to blogsville. To anyone waiting for a reply, thank you (as always) for your patience.

Today I shall be showing you some images shot by Bob in California (www.robertccochran.com – and the website comes with some incredibly relaxing music), which I think are quite special. Enjoy!

I love the steps in that last one. Bob’s asked me to suggest a title for it; I’m thinking ‘Drift’ or ‘Launch’. It has elements of both.

And thanks for your comments, both on and off the blog – it always amazes me how many people I meet who tell me they read it.

Pianos, Women & Houses

ERWhittington 8 Comments

Amongst other things, today has involved googling for local piano restorers (my Grieg doesn’t sound as good on my long-unplayed piano as it does on my teacher’s) and stumbling across a fascinating blog about a 30-year-old piano tuner who has ‘no fixed abode’, having moved out of his flat a couple of years ago, deciding instead to just find somewhere to sleep wherever he happened to be at the end of his working day. I really love discovering alternative lifestyles and learning about other people’s choices. I personally couldn’t live like him – I am a home maker at heart – but wow, how interesting! Too many people don’t question what is ‘normal’ and conventional. It’s a topic that really interests me – a while ago I seriously considered researching and writing about it via a series of interviews, inspired by the incredibly interesting people I tend to meet on my travels – maybe I might, one day. Especially in the context of women and issues around femininity and the construction of identity, womanhood and the multitude of choices that abide therein.

(I think I look like quite a strong (albeit vulnerable too) woman in this shot by Mosa (One Pix Art), Beverley Hills):

In other news, and hopefully without jinxing myself by writing it ‘out loud’, I have been for a long, sustained amount of time been going to bed every night noticing and marvelling at how happy I am now. I’m so busy doing what I love, decisively focussing on what I know makes me happy (dance, music, writing, learning (languages)… it’s always been this these things; I’m sad without them) and being grateful for all the small and big things I am so lucky to have and experience. For a while back then I was distraught and now I am liberated!

Snow Deer & Winter’s Wonderland

ERWhittington 3 Comments

I was going to blog some shots of me taken in a desert next, but from one extreme to the other, I’ve decided instead to show some images from a much colder shoot, taken recently here in Oxfordshire. Snow galore!

I recently had to cancel my trip to Cambridge due to the snow, which was so disappointing and meant I missed out on a good wedge of work I’d carefully planned, not to mention letting down the photographers who’d been planning things with me, but what can you do… Luckily everyone was very understanding and thought it was a sensible decision (simple fact was that there would be a 99% chance I wouldn’t be able to get out of my road; can’t really argue with that, can you?!).

It’s all very well these gung-ho ‘I’m gonna make it however much snow there is! I laugh in the face of nature – nothing will stop me!’ attitudes from models and photographers on forums keen to show off their ‘dedication’, but with one very local fatality on the roads, the day I would have been driving – a girl in my year at school whose car went off the road due to the snowy conditions (I didn’t know her personally as it was a large school, but it’s such a sad story), I’m glad I made the decision to stay safe, and have luckily already managed to rearrange my trip to Cambridge for the next available weekend, 9th/10th March. It’s just one of those things that comes with the territory of living relatively out in the sticks rather than in a city, where things are probably gritted more consistently.

That said, a lovely, local-ish photographer I’ve worked with lots of times, Karen Jones (or purpleport profile here), came to my rescue at the last minute in her landrover, after I posted my last minute availability on my facebook page, driving to pick me up and shooting with me in the massive woodland that is five minutes from my house. (Those ‘sticks’ I was talking about? They have their perks!!)

We had fun trying out a few different scenes – open fields, close trees and a few things in between – going for a bit of a fashion-y/princess theme with long dresses, bodices and skirts.

(I think I need a deer to the left of the frame in the above shot, which reminds me: we saw one during the very first ‘blue’ set! I’m gonna steal Karen’s facebook snapshot of it to post at the end…)

Here’s the deer. What a cutie, poking its head up to see what was happening. It was quite far away but Karen had her camera around her neck and grabbed a quick snapshot before it sprung away out of sight.

And then, because I’m such a child, Karen let me pretend to throw snowballs at her at the end… 😉

 Dun dun derrrrrr…!

Maya, and Stupidity

ERWhittington 3 Comments

As everyone probably knows, via the deluge of related facebook updates online if not by simply looking out the window, it’s snowy here in the UK. I ended up having to cancel my weekend plans to visit Cambridge and lost out on quite a bit of earnings PLUS a cancelled hotel booking (and subsequently had to cancel my Plan B of having a girly lunch here in Oxford due to a second round of snowfall this morning). BUT, I have already managed to rearrange my Cambridge trip to 9th/10th March, and managed to bag myself a photoshoot outside in the snow while I was at it, courtesy of a photographer with a landrover! Hopefully more on that in a future post, but suffice it to say, we had fun out there in the winter wonderland near my house!

Today has involved such things as German lessons with the Vati, piano practise and other such Edwardian-style pursuits, plus a dash of catching up on Take Me Out, which I think is more of a comedy than a dating show, but brilliant nevertheless. (When asked to describe herself in astronomical terms, it emerged that one girl didn’t know what a constellation was…. AND THEN HE PICKED HER! Excellent. As a person who is academically quite intelligent but life-wise extremely ‘ditzy’ (not to mention impractical) myself, I can relate to her brain collapse, if I squint a lot, and will refrain from making the observation that there definitely exists a certain type of men who seem to pick stupid women simply to make themselves feel more clever. Fair play to them.)

Taking out my bitch teeth (arguably), I have been revisiting my (younger) youth recently via a stint of teenage-self albums, via the humble minidisc (which I am prone to defending on any invitation, so I won’t let myself start on about how ridiculous it is that they didn’t catch on, when CDs scratch so easily and fall over and die after three plays, whereas minidiscs keep their chip protected by tough plastic and last pretty much forever, or about how I worked for ÂŁ3 p/hr at a bakery, aged 15, to buy my flashing-light CD/minidisc player which I still use and love). The problem is, I don’t have all my favourite albums from my (younger) youth* on actual CD and therefore digitally/on my phone/iPod if I ever buy one, which is a sad state of affairs. (I buy CDs most weeks now, and have done for years, but am ashamed to say that a lot of my early music collection came from ignorance/indifference regarding the illegal download phenomenon). Nevertheless, on my ÂŁ3 p/hr CD/minidisc player, I’ve just been playing Destiny’s Child for half an hour and am now girl power in human form. 

OK, I’ll shut up now and show a recent favourite photo, taken by an Australian friend/model/photographer, Jayne Hartt, while cooling off between other shoots. I love it! 🙂
*Destiny’s Child, Nelly Furtado, Usher, Mariah Carey, Christina Aguilera, The Sugababes… etc…. 
Funny story about The Sugababes actually… Due to my past illegal downloading/’sharing’ of music (which I emphasise I truly am ashamed of and would NEVER do now) I have one Sugababes album, ‘Three’, which ends with the song ‘Maya’. This is an absolutely stunning, beautiful, soul-warming track which I used to re-wind and play over and over again. It’s sung by Heidi and, being the very last track, marks a change in direction for the group from RnB to something more timeless and universal… Or so I thought… It turns out (and I discovered this only yesterday!!!) that the ‘Maya’ I was listening to at the end of the Sugababes album was not in fact sung by the Sugababes (I now wonder why I so firmly believed it was a solo by Heidi – I think I thought I’d read it somewhere! I even remember thinking that she must have trained with some eastern/Asian singing tutors especially!) but in fact by Susheela Raman, a completely different singer of southern Indian (Tamil)/UK descent. When downloading the individual tracks by the Sugababes, I obviously mistook ‘Maya’ by the Sugababes (which is apparently a song dedicated to Mutya Buena’s younger sister, who sadly passed away), for a southern indian love song. True story. And to do Susheela Raman’s ‘Maya’ credit (it really is a stunning, captivating song; Heidi truly outdid herself…) here’s the song, below, and I’ll order the (physical) album on which the original (imposter) ‘Maya’ appears, Salt Rain –  because it’s nice to know that this song isn’t just a one off on the part of the Sugababes, and that there is more of this beautiful voice to listen to!

Life is a Blur…

ERWhittington 3 Comments

…. with some marvellous details caught in the light and some defined/definitive moments of pure grace, joy and beauty… (e.g. just the other day I had a pretty glam-filled day of modelling for the very talented Yerburys again at the SWPP convention, at the Presidential suite at the London Hilton, no less, then rushing to see the pre-Raphaelite exhibition at the Tate; brilliant; this being a strong candidate for favourite-ship (I can’t help it, I’m a romantic) – (and we got in for free, despite it being sold out!!), then rushing off to the opening of the Beauty of Women exhibition at The Menier Gallery, which featured 3 photographer/artists I’d worked with. I was exhausted at the end, having survived only on a crappy vegetable samosa and a very unglamourous (but tasty!) stop at a dirty chippy for sustenance… Exhausted but happy!

…But yep, life is a blur (a bit like my commitment to refraining from spontaneous and non-sensical punctuation and sentence structure, and the over-use of parenthesis, for the purposes of this (and other) blog post(s)). That’s why I’ve made the decision to drastically reduce the number of photoshoots I do this year. I’ll only be doing about two a week, and only really at the weekends (not including trips abroad, of which I have already planned quite a few). This means I’m having to often book things an insane number of months in advance, because there simply aren’t that many weekends in a month, it turns out. I feel bad about it, but I’m also really excited as I know it’s a good decision! I need to force myself to have the guts and weekday discipline to focus on what I really want, life-dream-wise. I’m sure you understand. And I will still be loving my photoshoots at the weekends, and the wonderful opportunities to travel that this work is bringing me throughout the year. This is what’s happening between now and August-ish. After that (and for shorter periods before then too), I will probably be backpacking.

My previous blog post reminded me that there was an un-blogged set Keith Cooper did with me in Cheltenham Film Studios. These remind me of watercolour sketches. I like the abstract body shots most, I think – especially no.s 6 & 10. 🙂

(Perhaps I’m in the mood for bums.)