's Gravenvoeren, Saturday 14 September 2019.  Appointment with Britt for a shoot in B&B Luna Loft.  The area is quiet, rural and hilly.  This may have been a farm in the past.  Now, one building houses this B&B : ground floor, one floor and a small attic space. The owner lives in the building opposite.  There is a yard between the two.  To get everything in the picture at once, I used a fish-eye lens; the bottom rows of tiles are completely distorted, but the beams in the image are also bent in reality.     My own feet were almost in the picture ! 

I didn't think it was enough that Britt would put on those boxing gloves.  She also had to look a bit aggressive.  She succeeded completely in that.  Later I cut them out in Photoshop and placed them in front of the abstract painting that was hanging on the wall. Photography is never a representation of the full reality.

I always come up with the starting pose myself.  And I MUST have the photo of it.  Then the model can make variations on this starting pose.  Usually it is one of the variations that makes it onto the site.  Britt did it brilliantly !    She seems to be in dialogue with the head of the mannequin, which desperately wants her body back.

I really wanted to have a model pose with a crossbow.  No one was hit because the bow was locked.  I made the chain mail myself and tied it around her waist.

For this photo I stood half a floor below Britt.  'Then she will automatically get long legs in the photo', I thought.  Britt worked with angles here, very professionally, but it didn't give the long legs I had hoped for.  My own fault.

I find the contrast between the sleek floor and the fantasy separation very special, especially with Britt as an attractive go-between.

The upper part of the photo is cold, the lower part is much warmer.  Balance is important, right ?

Don't try this at home.

I once received a book as a birthday present.  That's nothing special, you say, and you're right.  Only, this book is made of stone.  Maybe it's not immediately noticeable, but it's still a sculpture.  There's a reflection written on the top.  It ends with the words 'Sofie is a wise one'.   In Ghent, (my hometown) this means both 'Sofie is a sympathetic' and 'Sofie has a lot of wisdom'.  Britt lives in Limburg.  A smile plays around her mouth.  Did she understand the double layering?

The fallen angel. 

Here I wanted to break the cliché of the white angel wings : the angel has had a fall and some feathers have come loose.  The tiles are also a bit damaged, but that is because they come from an old monastery, the owner told me.

The large, round arch probably once housed the entrance gate to the stables.

A narrow hallway next to the stairs leads to the space under the stairs : the laundry room!  But the setting is good enough for some experiments.

There is some smoke curling around Britt's feet, thanks to her mother operating the smoke machine switch off-screen. The smoke itself is still a bit bluish; apparently the machine wasn't at full power yet.

Britt takes the mannequin out of the shower that is ablaze.  Well, a lot of 'light' and very little 'blaze'.  The left leg of the mannequin fell off three times. In the end I decided to leave that leg out completely; the viewer just imagines it.