Grete is a really amazing friend of mine, we work on some really cool projects together, I owe a large part of my photography success to her and she's one of those irreplaceable people without whom life wouldn't quite be as awesome as it is. I have had tons of shoots with Grete but on top of that some of the coolest projects I have worked on have been in collaboration with this amazing person. A couple of weeks ago, we had two shoots - one of them was a really simple, very chilled out shoot to get some beautiful pictures of Grete.

Let my soul smile through my heart and my heart smile through my eyes, that I may scatter rich smiles in sad hearts. - Paramahansa Yoganada

This definitely is not Grete trying to reapply makeup with a knife.

The second shoot however was something pretty special, we rented this Native American style headwear, hired a pro makeup artist to take care of makeup, went to a lovely rocky beach and waited for the sunset. Like literally waited for the sunset, for about five hours. I still haven't really thought of a good excuse on why we went there so early. We planned taking photos while the sun was setting and then a few shots after, at blue hour. I mean normally I plan these kinds of simple, really obvious things perfectly but I guess I must have been a little too excited to shoot with Grete. It was a challenging shoot, I wanted Grete to pose low, on the rocks to have them be a bigger part of the image than they would otherwise. This was a pretty difficult situation to pose in but luckily Grete managed to do a really fantastic job. The backlight of the sun also worked out really well even though it washed out some colours in the foreground, that was something which I had to resort to photoshop for. Personally I think that one of the most important ingredients of this shoot was the makeup. I rarely do photoshoots with overly fancy makeup but just a couple of days before, I was hanging out with Grete and we somehow came to the conclusion we should do something a little bit, out there. After an evening of messages and phone calls to various makeup artists to find one that could come help us on the next day we found one, she did a fantastic job of it too. The shoot came together, it worked out. It wasn't a shoot where I had so many good photos to choose from the picking "the one" is almost impossible but I got one, really solid, strong image. That to me is job well done.