The Elven Princess

Model: Nadja S. Jensen

In the Enchanted Realm, there is an Elven Princess who walks in silence, surrounds herself with the beauty of nature. You can find her lingering in the evening mist....

"The Day The Roses Left Her"

"She Waits In The Mist For Dusk To Keep Her Company"

"She Heard The Trees Sing And It Filled Her With Sorrow"

"She Carried The Light Into The Dark"

This shoot came to be, simply because I wanted to shoot this dress right away upon receiving it in the mail. It's a dress that I've admired long ago on Asos, but it was way too expensive, but then as I was browsing for a dress for another shoot, I stumbled upon this beauty at a reduced price and I went for it. It's intended for a water shoot that I've been planning for a while, but when I looked at it in real life on my mannequinn, I knew I had to use it for more than just one shoot.

The following week, my model Nadja and I both had Thursday off from work, so we decided to do a shoot. What I was envisioning for the shoot was this elven maiden in the wilderness in the sunset, so what better place to go to than my favourite garden.

Nadja come over at two o'clock and I did the makeup. For some reason time flew by ridiculously fast and we weren't on our way until around five o'clock. I didn't worry too much about it, though, because it was such beautiful weather that there would plenty of light for several hours yet.

In the garden, which we almost had all to ourselves as we only saw one other person there, we kind of struggled to find the perfect spot. The other times I'd been to the garden it'd been full of flowers and so much light, this time everything was so overgrown and large parts of the garden were so dark in the shadows of trees that seemed to have grown so much since last I was there. I'm amazed at how much this place changes throughout the seasons of the year. Now I can't wait to visit during Autumn and see how it looks then.

Anyway, because it was such an impromptu shoot, I hadn't had time to scope out a nice place, and I felt a bit bad that we had to log around all of our stuff for so long. I noticed one spot, when we were walking around and I knew we were going to use it, there was just too much light at the time. Eventually, I chose a spot which had just such beautiful lighting with the sun going down behind the trees - however, the fact that the lighting was just right as we got there, meant I didn't have loads of time to spend on building the fresh flower crown that I'd planned to. I started at it, but quite quickly I could tell that it would take much too long for us to make use of the light. So I scrapped it, but we still used the roses in the shoot.

I really liked how nice and easy the shoot was - and by that I mean that it didn't take a whole of effort on my part to make it work (haha), Nadja in the pale dress was just so stunning against the dark background and with the dark hair. It's not really hard to make someone look good who's already looking so ethereal ;)

Honestly, it was just what I needed after several weeks of creative frustration. As I'm writing this, I have so many costumes ready to shoot, that I can't shoot until a few things fall into place. It can be quite frustrating to spend weeks and weeks creating costumes and planning the photos in my mind, and not getting to release that and make it come to life in a shoot, it causes the creative energy to build up and makes me so distracted. In the meantime, I'm trying to work on new ideas, but the "old" ones keep popping up, because they're unfinished. Ugh. Right, so getting to spend a lovely afternoon and evening outside in good company, shooting in a beautiful location was just amazing. When I first started shooting Nadja, after not having used my camera for a month, and everthing looked so good, I was elated and all over the place, greedily snatching every shot I could get from all the angles, haha.

After the first past of the shoot, after we'd massacred the roses, we went to the first spot that I'd seen when we first looked around the garden. The sun was almost in the right position for the light I wanted, but there was just enough time to do a little video shot. I don't think I've really talked much about video here on this blog, except that I bought a new dslr for video. Anyway, I'm really interested in shooting videos, l'd like to do a proper short film shoot one day. I thought easing myself into it by stepping up the behind the scenes game a bit, would be a nice way to do so. Mostly, my behind the scenes shot have been shot on a tripod with either me or Tenna operating it. But I don't always have enough time to do something more than just filming what is. So for this shoot, I got to do a shot of Nadja walking. Yes, it's extremely simple and that was the point. Right away, from the moment I told Nadja to go ahead and start walking, I realized how much I have to think about every single shot that I do. And how much I have to think ahead. It was so much fun shoot these small clips. And when I got to edit the video from the whole shoot, after I'd found a nice track to use for it, it kind of went in a slightly different direction than any of my previous BTS videos. I kind of like it, and I hope you do too.

We also used some smoke on the shoot and I think this may be my favourite time using smoke on a shoot. These big smoke bombs that create a huge amount of smoke, but settles so beautifully in the air once the bomb's burned down, did precisely that on this evening - as you can see in the video, it looks like a mythical forest.