Eleanor Jane

CASTING CALL: Models Needed

CASTING CALL: Models Needed

I’m looking for strong, confident, experienced models for a test shoot in early April. The shoot concept is rock&roll blondes & groupie culture; from Pam De Barres’ era hippies to glam rockers & hair metal. Think young, stunning, self-assured & sensual girls hanging out at the backstage door after a gig; eyes smudged with kohl, skin glistening with sweat & knees bruised from dancing up against the barriers all night.

Models must be:

♥ Female (sorry boys!)
♥ Age 16+
♥ Blonde (hair would preferably be shoulder length or longer)
♥ Able to pose & work a look using own initiative and without constant direction
♥ Available to travel to a studio in the South Wales area in early April

If you are interested please send five low res examples from your portfolio to eleanor@eleanorjane.co.uk by Friday 25th March. Please feel free to email me if you have any questions. Thank you!

Elliot J Frieze S/S 2011

If you've been visiting my website for a while now you might remember my past shoots (1 & 2) with the Rhys Giles salon for L'oreal and the British Hairdressing Awards. Bback in September Rhys and his team collaborated with fashion designer Elliot J. Frieze to style the London Fashion Week launch of his Spring/Summer 2011 collection and the following day I had them at the studio to shoot the results. It has taken me a while to get around to sharing these but here are a few shots from the day. Let me know what you think!

I'm really eager to shoot something a bit more vibrant & popping next year (& purple!) as well as some real high contrast black & white with loads of texture, smokey eyes and rock & roll blondes... so if you know any stylists looking to boost their portfolios, send them my way!

I'm not dead... honest!

Oh my gosh, I totally tempted fate with my last blog post. I quote;

"...more editing than my creaky Macbook can handle..."

Days later, after a spectacularly vocal performance of whirring & crunching, my laptop ground to a halt. No amount of open mouthed gaping, shouting or crying would revive it (would you believe?!). My poor hard drive had stretched to capacity, keeled over and passed on. It cleverly timed this little mishap to coincide with a big back-up to my external hard drive of everything I had been editing that week, eliminating hours of hard work. I had given myself square eyes for nothing!

The moral of the story? Be a super neurotic nerd and back up your work EVERY SINGLE DAY! & never ever think that for once you might be on top of things because technology WILL fail you.

Weeks later and I now have a vast & capacious shiny new hard drive, an operating system I don't understand and updated versions of all my software that in no way resemble the ancient versions I'm used to. So, needless to say things are going pretty slow on my end but I am beginning to catch up!

Anyway, aside from this absolute massive disaster minor blip I have been working like a mad thing (averaging around 6 days a week since September!) but life is finally winding down for me and I'm looking forward to Winter Solstice & Christmas & planning next year's projects & adventures.

A FEW GOOD THINGS!

♥ Booking flights for 9 days road tripping around California with my Peabrain in January, AT LAST!
♥ Buying all sorts of awesome camping gadgets for the trip.
♥ Revamping the cat costume for Halloween. Any excuse to be a Catface!
♥ Celebrating Guy Fawkes night waving a soggy sparkler out of the landing window and cooking veggie sausage & spicy apple casserole.
♥ Meeting lots of lovely brides and booking up so many wedding photography dates for next summer. It's going to be a busy one!
♥ Expanding my sock monkey empire.
♥ Frosty weather.
♥ Working, working, working, working, working!
♥ Being on television (!)...

& more on that later this week!

L'oreal Colour Trophy success!

Exciting news! You may remember that a few weeks ago I shot a new campaign for super talented hair stylist Rhys Giles at my studio. Rhys entered the images into the L'oreal Colour Trophy and we have just found out that he and his team have won through the initial stages and have been invited to compete in the live finals in London later on this month. Rhys Giles is one of only two salons from Wales to have made it this far so it's quite an achievement. Some of my favourite images from the shoot are below and I'll be adding some of the others to my commercial section later on this week. Let me know what you think? & GOOD LUCK RHYS!

 

 

 

Ffoto Week 01.02.10

1. Four models, two hairdressers, two make-up artists, two assistants, the company directors, a fashion stylist and me.... behind the scenes at my studio this week shooting a new campaign for Rhys Giles and entry into the L'Oreal Colour Trophy 2010. Pictures coming soon!

2. The Lauren Child exhibition, Green Drops and Moonsquirters, has come to Cardiff Museum & Gallery and after a few weather related false starts I finally made it for a visit along with my good friend Hubert Horatio Bartle Bobton-Trent (well... Adam). Undeterred by finding ourselves to be the only adults around we launched without reserve into exploring Grubby Alley with Pesky Rat, dressing up in purple lamé wizard capes from Charlie & Lola's fancy dress box, playing a giant game of connect four and admiring the intricacies and fussiness of bringing a Lauren Child book to life.

3. Miraculously, over the past month I have suddenly become an amazing baker! I swear I must have made at least half of Nigella's Domestic Goddess recipes already but after two brioche & butter puddings in as many days and a batch of 24 Harry Potter themed fairy cakes for a housewarming party last weekend, Chris has asked me to stop as apparently all that excess butter and sugar is turning him into a little pork pie. Sulk.

NEXT TOP MODEL WINNER

You might remember that way back in August I photographed a modelling competition to find a new face for hair salon chain, Burlesque. It seems like forever ago now but after eight weeks of fervent campaigning, emails were counted, votes were tallied and after a few glasses of bubbly and some nibbles at the Smirnoff V Awards, the winner was announced to be the absolutely stunning Nicole Kinnear! I recently got her into my studio to shoot Burlesque's latest collection and despite temperatures being ever so uncomfortably chilly, she was a natural. We worked with the incredible Tamsin Witts-Thomas on make-up which I was super excited about as I'd been enviously watching her Model Mayhem portfolio over the past few months and was eager for an opportunity to collaborate. I can't sing her praises highly enough! Tamsin  is fabulously talented, enthusiastic and it's mesmerising to watch her work. So thank you Nicole, thank you Tamsin and a big thank you to Liz Richmond for retouching the images that went to press. Check out some of the shots below...

 

Morning meetings are fun!

I had a really exciting art direction meeting this morning with salon leader and stylist Rhys Giles about a shoot we have coming up in January. Over a cup of tea (& a miniature chocolate!) we went through the mood boards, hair test shots and the initial style ideas and I'm pleased to report that it's coming together fabulously. I'm so enthusiastic about this shoot! We have an incredible creative team already working hard and preparing to throw themselves straight into the project after Christmas. I'll share more on the work in the future but for now here is a behind the scenes video of our last shoot for the British Hairdressing Awards earlier this year which has, until now, somehow totally passed me by! I've never been on a video before, it's quite fun! Here it is (my studio is the first minute or so):

I should really be updating the PHOTOGRAPHY & COMMERCIAL galleries at the moment and fixing a few things that have gone wrong but my niece (well, faux niece - but I think I have known Daddy Bartlett long enough now to stake a claim on his daughter!) Elizabeth's Christmas present has just arrived and it's BLOODY AMAZING so I'm going to go play with it for a while instead...

URGENT!

Eeek, it's all a bit last minute but I am looking for an assistant who is available to help shoot a magazine editorial THIS THURSDAY. It will be an evening shoot with one model and small a hair & beauty team to coordinate, so nothing too hectic. I'm interested in someone who is willing to get stuck in and help out with the boring bits, rather than someone who will try to take over the shoot with their own creative vision! Basically helping me with the lights, keeping the studio clean & tidy, helping the stylists/model, making tea, maybe popping to the shops to get bits & pieces if anything goes drastically wrong. Preferably I'd like someone with some experience of using studio lighting, taking meter readings... that sort of thing. You must also be friendly, confident and have the ability to act on your own initiative. The position will be good professional practice as you will be an integral part of a commercial shoot even if you wont be taking any pictures yourself. It may even be an opportunity to make a few contacts. And of course, if it goes well there may always be the chance for future work on other projects.

If you think you might be interested and have a portfolio of work (or a few relevant images) please email me at eleanor@eleanorjane.co.uk by TOMMORROW morning. You MUST be available from 4pm on Thursday afternoon until at least 8pm.

"...don't be such a tourist. What does it matter when it was built, if it's pretty?"

My blogging has been a little on the sparse side this past week as last week I sadly missed the Frieze Art Fair in order to work like a crazy thing. I've been dashing about between Cardiff, Hereford, back to Newport to photograph a cover for the Voice Magazine's Smirnoff V Awards special then off to Oxford for a weekend shooting the matriculation ceremonies at various colleges around the university. The nearest free wifi connection was in a  Little Chef cafe near my hotel and as much as I would have liked to grab a spare  hour tapping away on my laptop, an overpriced greasy roadside cafe didn't seem quite the place to do it!

Oxford was beautiful; I came over all Brideshead Revisited imagining Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder stumbling down the cobbled streets, champagne fueled, "unused to wine", rambunctious, disorderly and gloriously camp! No personal photos unfortunately as I was on a tight schedule, nipping between colleges and negotiating the awful traffic. I would like to visit again soon though, perhaps for a long weekend people watching in the coffee shops and walking through the botanical gardens ("I don't know where I should be without the botanical gardens!"). If you have any recommendations of interesting or unusual things to see or places to stay in Oxford I would love to hear about them.

So, lots of blogs to catch up with and it's back to working on the Tinkers Infinity project from the studio for me! (Awesome - for the first time ever Typepad has decided to co-operate and let me change the colour of my links!)

 

My Studio

My studio is unnaturally tidy this morning so I thought I would share some pictures as it's unlikely to look this spotless for a long time! Flick from Tinkers Infinity is visiting at lunchtime to spend the afternoon planning our new secret photoshoot project; likely to cause lots of mess, stress and fun in (hopefully) equal measures. We'll be casting for a model, a make-up artist, a hair stylist and a studio assistant soon so keep an eye on the blog if you fancy yourself as an integral part of a photoshoot and bagging some free handmade treasures as a result!