“I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”
It was early in the morning, we'd been staying at a kooky little house in the Devon countryside when the mist rolled in. We'd gone away with the intentions of creating and the weather seemed to be on our side. Mist is one of my favourite conditions to shoot in, there is something magical about it, and something that little bit uncanny.
Uncanny is definitely what we were after even if we didn't entirely have a plan. We bundled out in the country lanes and headed slightly up the hillside to a golf course (cue several disgruntled golfers), decked up in wellies and coats and hauling with us a small mound of tulle netting. Once we'd found a little spot, by an old crumbling wall, which looked particularly inspiring, our model bravely shed her coat and shoes and danced in the dew, as if she were a ghost stepped right out of the very best Brontë novel.
I rediscovered these images on a snowy March Sunday and wondered how I didn't 'see' them before. I looked at them but I never really saw them for how beautiful, eerie, and inspiring they were. I was too caught up in how beautiful the images from the first half of the shoot were before we decided to swathe our model in a veil and have her dance once more onto the moor (included below for your perusal).
But I am glad that it took me until that chilly March morning to find them again, when I was particularly in need of some inspiration.
