This week’s Country Life Magazine‘s frontispiece features the highly talented and utterly beautiful actor Kate Phillips, who appears in the Downton Abbey film as Princess Mary. You might also recognise her as Linda Shelby in Peaky Blinders.
A special thank you to Paul Ellis who assisted me in this shoot, Mach Management for make up, the Ritz London for providing a fabulous location and a much needed supply of coffee, and Lucy Editor, the picture editor at Country Life for this wonderful commission! Feeling very blessed.
Very honoured to have met and photographing this inspiring young lady – Sophie Montagne. As covered recently on the BBC news, Sophie is part of the first all female team attempting to cross Antartica later in November this year. The team has just returned from 3 weeks training in the Norwegian Wilderness, where they have skied 463km and climbed over 6000m, pulling 50kg behind them (about 75% of their bodyweight).
In November, their 3 month journey will be cover 1,700km during which they will be battling temperatures of -50C with wind speeds over 60mph. Some feat. Follow them on twitter @exicemaiden.
Not exactly your usual frontispiece, but this is one of my favourite photos for Country Life. My great friend and hugely talented make up artist, Amanda Jackson Sytner, and I headed down to the dark depths of Devon on a cold wintery day in early March.
Publication was set for the end of April, so I’d been briefed to capture the colours of spring. but there was not a flower let alone a bluebell in sight. Fortunately the yellow derelict digger, aka “Custard”, caught by eye and invited some quirky compositions, and worked particularly well with Freddie’s bright green dress. The red wellies provided the final touch.
This portrait may not have captured any spring flowers, but the bright colours made a pretty good substitute on this bleak midwinter’s day!
