Our first shoot had been great fun – the first modelling shoot for both of us – so we decided to do another fairly quick shoot (about 40 minutes) at our favourite location. At the time it was a mostly-abandoned industrial estate, all nicely rusty. Unfortunately for us, now it’s been renovated, and looks like a much better place to run a business, but not so good for photoshoots.

We started in front of a yellow roller shutter, which made a good background – Lauren was mainly wearing blue, and yellow and blue is a good combination.

The rusty stairs had worked well last time, so we went for them again – taking a bit of care over angles, with the short skirt Lauren was wearing! They make for a wonderfully grungy style.

The wall was quite good, but only briefly. The last photo is just after Lauren realised it was covered in small spiders, which were all deciding she was more interesting to crawl on than a wall. I’d like to say that I stepped in and dealt with the spider situation, but it would be a lie. I’m pretty pathetic when it comes to spiders.

A shipping container worked for a background for some simple portraits, which always work well with Lauren. She’s got this face, you know? It’s a good face.

I grabbed a quick shot from further away as we looked for ideas, which I rather liked – the light behind gave Lauren a bit of a glow.

A few more portraits with nicely blurry backgrounds. I do love bokeh. Let me know if you get sick of looking at Lauren’s face, won’t you?

Not sick if it yet? No, hasn’t happened to me yet, and we’ve done a few shoots now. OK, a few more.

As much as it doesn’t seem right to put Lauren in the corner, that’s what we did next.

There was a gate standing open with a ‘Keep Out’ sign, which was quite appealing.

A bit of a heap of stuff from some work that had probably been started and given up on at some point made for another grungy look.

Then there was the Strange Cone. I’m not sure, but it looks like Chinese characters on it. I was quite excited about this cone. I’m not sure Lauren really felt the same way about it.

Especially when I came up with the idea of Lauren pretending to be the cone. But she did it anyway. Probably just humouring me.

And finally, another roller shutter. Hey, that worked out quite well – bookending the story with roller shutters. I should have planned that, but it just happened. Sometimes stories just work out. Anyway, this one was red, with big lettering saying ‘STORES’. No idea what had been stored there, but we finished the shoot off with a few more shots in front of it.

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