Photo shoots sound so glamorous, so fun, so exciting, right? Well, to me they’re not. To me they’re of course work, but also very demanding work. Before the photo shoot comes the never ending anxiety about not having a great body day the day of the shoot. Even worse, when the shoots are several days in a row, how do you look “perfect” one time after another? It’s demanding on your mind as well as your body..

I work with photographer Pavel Ythjall. Us two make magic. The process however is anything but magic. It’s a battle! Usually I’m in a pissy mood right before. I curse, yell, snap and look grumpy. I’m complaining about the stylist pulling my hair too hard or that the heavy makeup will have my skin break out the next days. I yell at Pavel for not talking to me exactly the minute I want to, I feel everyone is so damn slow or too talkative or too much in general. Am I a diva? Well, uhm, no, but it’s a lot of pressure and lots of money a stake. Remember too that I don’t eat my veggies or my life saving miracle noodles the day before in order to tighten my waistline, so I’m hungry and pissed.

When we then get to the first posing, the light needs to be set up. It’s a long process… And I freeze. How many times do you think I’ve been in a damn cold pool when the lights suddenly don’t work, the flash won’t fire, or what have you. In the mean time I stay in the freezing pool getting more and more annoyed. No way am I gonna go up and warm up cause then it feels even colder when I have to go back in!

Then comes the posing… Not getting the right look, Pavel is too slow because it’s hard to match my sucking in my waist, not breathing and squatting deep at the same time. “Just three more seconds, or ten” and I scream inside cause it’s a damn pain in the ass! After this, I look in the monitor and of course I’m not happy. I look smooth, fat, too buff, face looks funny, nose shadow etc etc. I yell at Pavel and Pavel yells at me. All in Swedish. Poor team. They know we’re not fighting just to fight, but because we have two strong wills and we want to create magic. I want it this way, I want Pavel to trust me on it, but Pavel wants another angle and says I shall trust HIM.

We scream, I need to go pee, Pavel needs some break, We need coffee, where is the damn runner? And I look at my watch, seeing oh another 10 hours to go…. I just want to say ‘IT IS A WRAP!!!’. I want to create magic in one hour. But that’s not the time it takes to do that… In one long day we might get about 3-5 killer shots that we find magical. And then a bunch of others that most people would say are fantastic but we say look like shit. We have very high demands on ourselves. We don’t want to just go and snap some conventional stuff. We want to create, lead the stream, make new never seen inspirational pics, immortalizing the image of Pauline Nordin….

After the shoot, if it has went well, it feels like I’ve diarrhea-ated my soul out. Pooping out all images I’ve had in mind. It’s tough to make the mind’s images match the real life ones. So that’s where the difficulty lies. Creating magic takes a lot of tough work. It’s a process. And when it’s done I say “never again!!!!” cause I’m sick of it, but then a day later I start to mentally prep for the next one… Even when it’s months to next time I’m up close with the camera….