In the day of prosperity be joyful

I've been editing the fashion section of the weekly publication, Varsity, here in Cambridge this term, together with Jess and Pete. Now I walk to my college early on Friday mornings to pick up the just-printed paper copy, which are distributed all around the university. I love the newsprint quality of the pictures, and still get excited when I see people in the streets looking at my photographs.

I took these pictures on an incredibly bright, warm day up on the sports fields in Cambridge, after a lot of careful outfit planning and organisation in getting all of the models together for the afternoon. I'd been wanting to do a sports-themed shoot for a long time, so it felt really good to finally be transferring it from my head to a reality.

It was very funny to walk through the town with the five girls all dressed in matching socks and high-waisted shorts, and we attracted a lot of attention. Every time I looked through the lens at the girls I laughed, and we made jokes and messed around all afternoon while I took the pictures, which was exactly as I wanted it. We had to climb over the wall to get to the pool, which made it all even more silly than when we managed to persuade the Cambridge lacrosse team to pose around Emma and Zara, and we were all still laughing as it started to get cold and we walked back to pack up the clothes and go for milkshakes together.

And they shall lift you up in their hands

Jumping into the lake at Ardeche gave me just a few seconds to wonder at how bright the sun on the lake was and how cold the water would be before I broke the surface. We jumped until it was too cold to carry on, and then went back to sit by the fire and try to shake the water out of our ears.

We see indistinctly, as in a mirror

Halfway through the summer we hitchhiked across France to Ardeche, where we stayed in the middle of fields full of wild thyme, ate peaches every day, and fell asleep in the afternoons. One day we travelled to a huge lake surrounded by towering rocks, where jumping from the greatest height became a competitive sport, avoided only by floating in the lake upon impact for the longest possible amount of time.

A feast is made for laughter

May Week in Cambridge absurdly falls in June, the week after exams and term have ended, and is set up to be consciously hazily hedonistic, lazy and lavish. Around the oysters, candyfloss and Pimms and lemonade that overflowed at every ball and garden party that we went to, we spent our time following the river into the countryside, discovering bright blue outdoor swimming pools, and duck-spotting. One afternoon between eating ice-cream on the college lawn and going punting in the night, Siobhan and I cycled to a strangely timeless open park of picnic tables and picket fences amongst the fields, where we marvelled at the colour of the pool and took these pictures.

The wings of the morning

These were taken on an incredibly sunny weekend in Cambridge, when we walked around St John's college and stared at the river running through it after I'd finished learning how to take apart film reels in the tiny projection box of the college.

There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God

For the last week I've woken up each morning feeling as though it's summer with the sun streaming through my window, so I pulled everyone out of their rooms on Saturday afternoon to have a picnic on the river bank. I bought flowers and fruit from the market on the way, and had to settle for tiny cakes and pink wafers after I couldn't find party rings for the picnic anywhere. But by the time I'd dressed and positioned everybody, and taken my rolls of film, they were all shivering so we packed up and ran back to college for steaming mugs of tea and the acknowledgment that summer is still not quite here.





And these were some of the images I first thought of when I had the idea for my pictures:

For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind

Brighton beach just after Christmas was windy and freezing, but the pier with the machines where you could gamble two pence coins away, Poundland, and the fish and chip restaurant were pretty warm. We ate cockles swilling in vinegar and waded into the icy sea next to the burnt pier as soon as we got to the beach, when we took these pictures.

Stolen waters are sweet

From the coast in Normandy we could see the English Channel Islands and listen to BBC radio, which gave me a strange sense of hovering between the two countries. We swam in the September sea, shivered on the rocky beaches, taunted Arturo's grandma's sausage dog, watched dubbed films, and on the last day I fell off my bicycle and cut my knees in the gravel.

Lead them unto living fountains of waters

At the sea the waves went way above our heads, and the saltiness of the water was almost painful. We took these pictures with an underwater camera, standing right in the thick of the waves.