Every spring, for just a few short weeks, the woodland floor turns violet. We arrived at the very end of those weeks.
Bluebells don't wait for anyone. When Weronika and I planned this editorial, we knew we were working against nature's own deadline — so everything was agreed in advance: the concept, the wardrobe, the timings, the exact woodland. We travelled up to Perthshire together, to an ancient oak woodland that's home to some of the oldest oaks in Scotland, hoping the bloom had held on for us.
It almost hadn't. The season was further gone than we'd hoped, the famous violet carpet already thinning between the trees.
The Concept
"In Bloom" was about softness meeting wilderness — a dreamlike, romantic mood set deep among the trees, with the violet haze of the bluebells doing what no studio backdrop ever could. Everything was planned around the evening light: we timed the shoot for golden hour, when the low sun cuts sideways through the oaks and turns the whole woodland warm.
When Nature Doesn't Cooperate
This shoot threw almost everything at us. The bluebells were past their peak, so instead of wide carpet shots we hunted out the densest surviving patches and shot into them with a wide-open aperture — letting the shallow depth of field melt the remaining flowers into a violet haze that filled the frame far beyond what was really there.
Then the midges arrived — anyone who has stood in a Scottish woodland on a warm evening knows exactly what that means. And Weronika wears glasses, which love to catch every gap of bright sky between the trees, so every set-up meant reading the light twice: once for her face, once for the reflections, adjusting our angles until both were clean.
Why It Still Worked
The honest answer: preparation and professionalism. Because every detail had been agreed before we set off, there were no decisions left to make on the day — we could spend all our energy solving problems instead of creating them. And Weronika was superb: patient through the midges, precise with every small adjustment, completely unfazed. When a shoot is planned properly with a professional model, even a difficult evening moves quickly.
We timed everything around the last light, when the low sun cut sideways through the oaks and turned the whole woodland warm, with a touch of off-camera flash filling the deeper shadows — balanced carefully so it never fought the natural evening glow.
The Edit
The edit leaned into the romance — warm golden highlights against the cool violet of the flowers, soft contrast, and gentle skin retouching that kept everything natural. The goal was for the final images to feel the way the evening felt: quiet, warm, and slightly unreal.
From Woodland to Print
A fading bloom, biting midges, tricky reflections — and the series still went on to be published as "In Bloom" in Enzomnia Magazine Issue 36 and featured in HAZL Magazine. Proof that a difficult shoot and a great shoot can be the same shoot, when the planning is done and the right person is in front of the camera.