TW: Hairy male body, Lactose
My ongoing quest to become the world’s greatest fashion, beauty, and lifestyle blogger knows no bounds. I’ve already blown away my critics with a series of award-winning (Best Fashion Videos: cookywook YouTube Awards 2016) fashion videos, and now I’m taking on modelling.
My inspiration came from friend-of-the-blog, Megs, aka Wonderful You. A powerful brand in and of herself, Megs works with the photography wizard that is Alex Cameron. Alex is a freelance photographer specialising in weddings, fashion photography, and portraits. Megs and Alex have done loads of work together doing all kinds of lovely shoots. If you visited the exhibition of Alex’s work at Espresso Library recently, you’ll have seen this pic of Megs as part of the Giants series. And that’s all great.
But the one photo the two did together that really caught my eye was this one of Megs in some milk.
It’s cool, right? And as an aspiring beauty, fashion, and lifestyle blogger it’s my obligation to try and one-up it. So that’s what I did.
With Alex’s permission and support we set up a little photoshoot at her base in Cottenham. We weren’t blessed with the best weather in the world, but we got enough breaks in the cloud to get some decent shooting time.
But first things first. I had to buy a paddling pool. And milk. Lots of milk. Around 40 pints of milk in total. The woman on the till at Sainsbury’s seemed pretty nonplussed about us buying such a large quantity of milk, offering a cursory ‘so what’s the milk for?’ more as small talk than anything substantial. She’s seen it all before I guess.
But it turns out that even that much milk doesn’t go too far when you’re filling up a paddling pool. I read in horror that the capacity of the child’s pool I’d bought off Amazon was actually 666L (why that of all numbers?). That’s roughly 1172 pints, or 1132 pints more than we had. But the good news was that we didn’t really need to fill the pool, and also that you can dilute milk quite a lot (pro tip: use whole milk!) without losing much in the way of opacity. But turning a puddle of milk into a luxurious silk bath with just a garden hose takes a long time.
In the meantime, we took some shots of folks flying around the garden. Here’s me.
I won’t spoil the magic of how it works, because it’s REAL ACTUAL MAGIC.
Soon enough, the milk was ready and in I got. Yes, I got down to my pants, specially selected to best match the milk and pool. Yes, it was super embarrassing. Yes, several of my close friends were watching. Yes, it was super super cold. And yes, I didn’t really know what I was going to do once I got in.
I mean, do you go for a straight-up modelling thing, pulling all those weird shapes that models do? Or just mess around and do loads of jokey stuff? Well, I ended up going for some kind of ironic extreme, playing down the whole thing but kind of taking it really seriously at the same time.
We tried to make it a bit playful by chucking some flowers in with me. And someone handed me a cup of tea as a prop. At one point, Edd poured milk over me as an action shot, an experience that was not unlike being waterboarded.
BUT ENOUGH YAPPING HERE’S WHAT YOU CAME FOR
Some kind of foetal thing. Very pretentious.
I like that in this one I’m smiling. I spent a lot of the shoot laughing.
MILK SHAPES DO YOU GET IT LIKE MILKSHAKE THE KELIS SONG
Not sure what the idea was with this one.
TEA.
About 20 minutes later, I climbed out. I was cold, wet, and both my ears and nose were clogged with milk. Let me tell you, no amount of showering will get that out. I could smell milk for days. Hell, I can still hear it. But it was fun.
What I’m trying to figure out now is how to get the most out of the photos for my PERSONAL BRAND. Yes, it all comes down to numbers. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook – you gotta think about it all. (Still working on the LinkedIn strategy). Social marketing is literally my day job, so this is an interesting little exercise. Hopefully this blog will work wonders. Please RT and share and offer me book deals.
OK THAT’S ALL BYE BYE