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Louise Ebel looking oh-so-pretty (and ethereal) in ASOS playsuit.For this Friday's blog edition, I tried to pick outfits to provide a little Christmas Eve/Christmas Day/New Year's Eve inspiration....but I fear that climate (depending on where you live!) and roast turkey with all the trimmings + Christmas pudding might not make tightly waisted, sheer dresses and playsuits all that practical! But they are sure pretty to look at :) I hope everyone has a very safe and happy holiday break. xxx
Ever since I saw the elephant seals on Highway 1 in California a couple of years ago, I have been slightly obsessed with seals (odd, I know!). So when I found out that there is a colony of grey seals which have their pups on the beach in Horsey, Norfolk (around a 3.5 hour drive from London) each December I knew that we had to take a drive. So a couple of weekends ago in the glorious winter sunshine, we packed our walking shoes and headed to beautiful Norfolk.
After a bolstering cup of tea at Little Chef (options are rather limited on the road to Norfolk from London ;) we parked at Winterton-on-Sea and set off on a 14.5km (9 mile) circular walk. Now, the thing is, I sort of read the "9 mile" bit of the walk directions before we set out, and thought it didn't sound too far. It was only afterwards that I realised 9 miles is rather a lot further than 9 km. Damn my lack of imperial sensibilities! But any resulting twinges in my feet and thighs by the end of the journey were minimised by the incredible beauty of the walk: the windswept dunes, the big blue sky with just a few thin, wispy clouds dotted here and there, the soft purple, magenta and greens of the winter vegetation in the Winterton Downs nature reserve, the majestic curve of the tower of St Mary Church in West Somerton (resting place of the Norfolk Giant, Robert Hales), the sheep munching away in the fields....and the baby seals! So very beautiful and fascinating to watch (from a safe distance as the mama seals can abandon the pups if you get too close). I didn't include any photos of them as they sort of just looked like plump, white-grey blobs in my photos (the only time I have wished for a big-ar*e zoom lens was on this trip) but I was just happy to have seen them.<
After a restorative night's sleep, we drove along the coast and then headed inland to our lunch destination, The Duck Inn in Stanhoe. Fantastic little pub/restaurant serving really tasty, locally sourced food (the fish and hand-cut chips were outstanding with homemade tartare sauce, muslin cloth wrapped lemon and proper mushy peas). The night before we had a very ordinary meal at a restaurant, which will remain nameless, that we were told is vying for a Michelin star.....the pork belly was burnt as was the sticky toffee pudding! Burnt sticky toffee pudding?!! Eep! Not my idea of a super night out. Good, well presented pub food (nothing mind-blowing, just fresh, local produce cooked beautifully) and really friendly service is what, I think, most people are after in a country pub. And good beer of course ;)
With full tummies, we drove the short distance to the magnificent grounds of Holkham Hall and had a post-lunch amble spotting migrating geese and lots of very pretty fallow deer.
And then we headed back to London!
p.s. Any food-obsessed people that are reading this, let me know if you have any recommendations of country pubs in England, Ireland, Scotland that have delicious food!
p.p.s. The little brown shoes are my new Tommy Hilfiger Bass penny loafers. So cute and great with jeans for long country lunches.
Miss Joanna Broomfield for Grazia.it.
One of the highlights of my recent trip back home to Australia (apart from visiting family and friends of course!) was photographing 5 super cool girls for Grazia.it. And Joanna is the first of the features to go live (yay!). So head on over to Grazia to find out Joanna's fav places to shop in Sydney, how her experience in Australia's Next Top Model Competition has changed her life(more on that in a minute), what tracks she is currently chilling to on her ipod and her perfect way to spend the day.
Sooooo some of you Aussie readers might recognise startlingly beautiful British model Joanna from Australia's Next Top Model competition where she came sixth in the competition out of 16 other girls. So amazing and I am immensely proud of her (in retrospect, as I didn't meet her until the day of our shoot!). Joanna has already achieved brilliant things in such a short period (she landed the cover of Frankie magazine -one of my favourite Australian publications-just before I photographed her) and I know she has a fabulous modelling career ahead of her. I kept telling Joanna that she has to come back home to Britain (she grew up in the UK and moved to Adelaide, Australia in her mid-teens) as I think she would do brilliantly over here.
Anyhoo, so Joanna now lives in Sydney and I headed on over to her house to photograph her in a few of her favourite outfits. Joanna lives with three other models, two of which were in Australia's Next Top Model competition with her (the surfboard in the photographs belongs to one of her flatmates.......and if he reads this, I promise it absolutely wasn't us who put a ding in the surfboard. It was the wind! Honest;) Can you imagine what parties at their house must look like? Beautiful faces, bodies and limbs everywhere :)
Joanna's style is, in her words, "androgynous and grunge" although I would add in "accessoried with quirky, feminine pieces like rings and necklaces". She loves trawling the various weekend markets in Sydney for vintage finds (find out where she is currently enjoying hunting for one-off pieces in the Grazia.it article) and likes Zara for basics (who doesn't?!) plus Australian label Saxony for investment pieces like the leather shorts in these photos.
And before you ask, yep, Joanna has a blog! So head on over to Blogfield.tumblr.com where Joanna posts snippets of things and people that inspire her (like musicians, photographers, and fashion) as well as documenting her own creative journey. As you might have guessed from the guitar in the photographs, Joanna is also a wonderfully gifted musician (and a great cook!) - she sings and plays guitar- and her New Year's Resolution is to post some of her own music on her blog.
So what was Joanna wearing on the day of our shoot?
Red shorts and white shirt (Zara)
Black dress (Saxony)
T-shirt (vintage) and black jeans (Levi's)
Black shirt (vintage) and black leather shorts (Saxony)
Jeans, jacket and shirt in the last photos (Levi's) and brown boots (Wittner).
Thank you to Joanna for being so, so easy to photograph (she really is super chilled and lovely) and a massive thank you to Joanna's awesome agent in Sydney, Priscillas, for hooking me up with Joanna.
