with silver bells and cockleshells

Some film photos from the weekend.

This post seems relevant right now. I'm very into reflections, sky, water, reflections on water, shadows, the suns rays, freckles and bouffant but stray and wispy peroxide blonde hair, clouds in the sky, 'slick' looking editorials with obvious flash or overexposed film and the silver/gold, blue colours that lend themselves to these sorts of photos. I've been scared of colour for a long time and I only started embracing it more this year and last year. Before 2012 I was most comfortable in dark granny florals, charity shop size 20 blouses and skirts that may as well have not had a waistband because I had to wear belts with everything all the time. I used to stick to 'safe' colours because otherwise I couldn't match anything. I am very conscious about matching my clothes. Now I have more clothes I have more than two things of the same colour so I can wear both and match. I hope I grow out of this because it is a really annoying habit and I can't rest until my clothes are cohesive. I think I have a happier medium now though, and colour allows me to be more creative. I started using the lookbook I signed up for in February 2011 the other day because it felt time to. I had always wanted to upload outfits but knew I wasn't totally ready, I was still striving to be better. I'm very tenacious and find myself rewriting essays because I make one mistake or lines overlap themselves. I redid pages of my textiles coursework 10+ times all the while knowing I wouldn't gain any marks for it, I just couldn't leave it alone. This means that sometimes I can't bring myself to even begin writing notes in lessons in case they aren't neat. I am a perfectionist and people see it as laziness (my physics teacher sees it as laziness) but the amount of discarded a4 sheets of paper at the bottom of my bag with a slightly slanted title or smudged ink (the bane of being left handed doesn't help either) are testament to a weird mentality I have about faultlessness. My instagram grid is another archetype of it, and it's biggest manifestation is in my clothes. I have been blogging for roughly 3 years now (not on this blog, the first two years were on my old blogspot, the reason I started a new one being that I felt I had changed too much to continue my old one) which seems like a long time to be documenting. I see it as a feat in itself because I spend a long time meticulously arranging things on here and clicking preview to see what it looks like, so publishing anything at all is like, a big deal. I also feel like people actually read this now, which I've never really had before. Sharing things online now isn't just documenting it for myself, which is what it was for a long time, but it now entails the possibility of people from school reading it, strangers, friends, even family. I'm not even saying what I put here is at all good, I just have to feel comfortable with it myself, which seems to be becoming ever more difficult as I become more aware of myself with age and the fact more people are going to react to it, which is awesome, but daunting. By the way, I'm only being really introspective because I turned 16 on Saturday and I've been apprehensive about it for a long time. Suddenly becoming a 'new' age after 365 days of being a different one, i felt, seems to feel like it should signify a 'change'. When you tell people you are an older age they expect different things of you. Things you achieve at 25 would have been more impressive if you had done them at 11 years of age. But really, you've been growing up a little bit over the span of those 365 days, there's just no milestone. People have asked me 'what does it feel like being 16?'. Well, it kinda feels exactly the same as I felt last week when I was 15 but for some reason I'm suddenly considered more mature and in the eyes of the law am now able to buy a lottery ticket, so yeah, I feel like a completely different person. I know I'm thinking about it too much and we need to have ages to gage how old people are, obviously, a 4 year old rarely has the same level of maturity as a 9 year old, and we can only see changes in people in retrospect, after enough time has lapsed to notice a difference. The fact this is signified by a specific date seems odd, but necessary, and I've been struggling with how I should be a better version of myself now I'm 16. In starting A Levels next year I need to really start working efficiently and dressing with less regiment, because I won't have a uniform to rely on anymore. I applaud you if you read all of that because it was effort to spell check.

Some photos (film) I took in London last weekend. I think they fit with the few lines above I wrote outlining inspirations and things that I've found interesting.

I love the reflections in this, and I feel like I couldn't have captured them on a digital camera. I feel empty without my ae-1 now despite having only used what, 4 rolls of film on it. It's a big step up from using the occasional disposable camera and it's costing me a fortune in film/processing but it's really cool to be able to take photos more manually, with less influence of automatic settings on a digital platform.

Marilyn Monroe, Me in Malta, Source unknown, Petra Collin, Petra Collins, Photo from tumblr captioned 'By Acidill'.

“Agricola Agricolam Agricolae”, The Face UK, October 1997, Rookie mag, Little House on the Prairie, Chanel, Little House on the Prairie, Unknown.

Britt Ekland, by Cleo Sullivan for Show 1999, I think this photo is a scan of mine from a book but it was saved on my computer and I don't know, Unknown, Petra Collins (by Maya Fuhr?), by Rosalind Duguid, an old disposable I took in 2011.

These are some music videos that are very visually enticing. If I haven't mentioned MS MR enough across my sprawl of social media sights recently, I'm going to do it again anyway. I discovered them through watching an online show called The Fox Problem (with Gemma Cairney) about a month ago; they were video calling to be on it and they played an excerpt of 'Hurricane'. They only have two music videos but both are divine. I probably prefer Fantasy though. I realise you may not want to watch the video itself so I screencapped them. It was hard to resist screencapping every frame.

The colours in this Noah and The Whale video are similar to the ones in Fantasy. The same cheerleader theme runs through both, and the added fact that Autumn de Wilde directed and filmed this makes it all the more excellent. As well as Charlie Fink's hair. The model, Megan Nison, has a Lara Stone/Emma Stone (maybe she is a long lost stone) likeness and she also looks exactly like a girl in my geography class, but she is ginger, not a dreamy peroxide blonde (have you grasped that I really want to be blonde for summer yet). I sort of want a goofy tooth gap but my teeth are already bucked so I'd only look alien, not like Lara Stone.

- Hollie