Here is something I didn't know before this job: daisies close at night. They fold up neat as little umbrellas the moment the light goes, which is a problem when your photographer has planned an entire night shoot around the romance of a daisy meadow. We stood at the edge of the field at two in the morning, one flash on a stand, and a thousand flowers pointedly asleep.
We shot anyway. The closed daisies turned out to be the better picture: pale buttoned-up buds catching the flash like a sky of tiny moons, all of them politely looking away. There's a frame of me lying barefoot among them that people keep calling dreamy, and I want it on record that the dream involved dew soaking through a white dress at a speed I can only describe as ambitious, and grass at 2am being roughly the temperature of a cellar floor.
The flash is what makes night meadow work so strange and so addictive. Between frames, the world is ink: you hear the photographer, you hear the wind doing inventory in the trees, you see nothing. Then the flash fires and for a thousandth of a second there's a whole silver world: every dew drop, every folded flower, my own hands looking like someone else's. You pose for a world you can't see. You learn to trust that it's there.
At around three, something began moving through the grass towards us with the confidence of a paying client. We froze. The photographer, a man who owns forty thousand euros of camera equipment, held out his light meter like a tiny shield. It was a hedgehog. It walked straight through our set, stopped once in the middle (directly on my mark, I'd like to note) looked at nothing in particular the way hedgehogs do, and carried on into the dark. We have one frame of him. Slightly soft, deeply confident. Best model I've ever worked with.
We wrapped when the sky started going navy at the edges, which is the blue hour's quiet knock at the door. I fell asleep on the drive back with grass in my hair and dew in my shoes, and woke up in Utrecht to a message from the photographer: just the hedgehog photo, no caption. None needed.