Motorbikes, manors and monkeys
Its not often that you find yourself being driven around the grounds of a luxurious country house hotel in a golf cart. The scale of the project we had undertaken probably hit home when I was sitting next to the porter at Stapleford Park that night. Or maybe it was when I was chasing a baby gibbon around Twycross Zoo or it could have been when I helped manoeuvre a brand new Harley Davidson out of a van at Sudbury Hall. These last three months have been rather interesting.
It seems quite odd now to look back at this adventure and doubt that it could have been anything but a success. From its quiet beginnings in a meeting with Sally, Lorna and Jayne at Jupiter to the launch event at The View from the Top gallery those nervy jitters the night before the visit to Twycross seem totally out of place. In fact, an excitable monkey was probably the best one to start with.
From shoot to shoot they kept on getting better and better and the planning and preparation we had put in really started to pay off. Locations opened up, outfits were offered, props arrived and eBay came into its own the weekend before the Cressbrook Hall shoot in the form of a 99p piano my wife bought. This calendar has certainly been blessed with some incredible help from some very generous and supportive people.
As you can probably tell there are lots of stories I could share with you about each of the shoots (but I won’t go into them all here), suffice to say that my abiding memory of this has to be the good humour and determination with which the ladies and the team went about each of their portraits. I had ladies stripping off in forests, dodging aeroplanes on runways and being incredibly seductive in restaurant basements. What more could you ask?
I hope that when you get one of these calendars on your wall you’ll feel just a little bit of the passion and excitement that we experienced when working on it. This calendar has certainly inspired the people who have been involved in it, and I hope you find a glimmer of that for yourself…
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