Charlotte Proudman doesn't want people to comment on the photos she sends them

You just have to laugh at the middle class and their angst, especially when it comes to chippy little things like Charlotte Proudman, pictured on the left. Charlotte sent a message to a senior barrister asking to connect with him on Linkedin. I imagine he gets loads of requests from ambitious young girls, so he accepted her request and sent her a routine reply complimenting her on the "stunning photo." Instead of being pleased that a senior figure had decided to notice her little University of Keele self, the young miss then decided to throw a wobbler and accused him of all sorts of really rather silly things. Then various other females decided to pile in and now it is rapidly being forgotten that she approached him, not the other way around.

The report also tells us that Charlotte is really pleased that so many men are sending messages of support to her. You would think by now that she is old enough to realise that they are only doing it in the hope of an easy leg over, but let's leave her with her fantasies of the new men rallying to her cause.

Enough of this merry banter: let's talk about the photo. The sensible thing for this bird to do would be to pass on the name of the studio who took it for her. It's a workmanlike shot that uses all the tricks that the girls like from a studio result. A light has been set up to make Charlotte's fringe look all nice and bright and when I was shooting publicity shots for models of various sorts back in the day that lighting trick usually had them squealing with delight when they first saw the contact prints.

The colour in the version I have from the Telegraph story makes the face look a bit washed out on the right of the image, but I imagine that the lights were set up on that side to conceal any skin blemishes with lights on one side of the face and  shadows on the other. The eyes do look a bit small to me, which is probably natural, so to compensate for that she should have been told to open them more, with perhaps the lips slightly parted as well. That would have removed the ugly ridge that you can see on the cheek which the shadow fails to cover. I would have set the camera slightly higher to make her look slightly up into the lens, which also helps smooth out the skin blemishes.

That aside, it is a nice shot, which probably cost Charlotte a few bob to have taken, so we must assume that she wanted people to look at it and her. Then she decided to throw a girly fit when someone did just that.

Don't ask me to try and understand what goes through female minds as they scamper around the hamster wheel of life.

It is a nice photo, though.

Postscript: I have found a better copy of the photo from Charlotte's own website, so presumably this is the official version that she likes. Sadly the colour still looks washed out to me. Enlarging the photo you can see that it was shot that way to try and cover up the skin blemishes and creases around the mouth. A pity it didn't work...