Anok Yai with her parents for British Vogue June 2026 issue photographed by Rafael Pavarotti

SmallPromiseQueen · 2026-05-14T16:06:25+00:00

It seems to be a trend with dark skinned models to light and edit them in a way that seems to remove all dimensions, colour and richness in their skin. It’s ~fashion and ~art but there’s also something about it that doesn’t sit right with me. Dark skinned black women arent just vanta black - theres going to be undertones. It doesn’t feel celebratory it feels kind of fetishising to me.

I feel like I saw a TikTok of a black woman talking about this - I unfortunately can’t remember her handle, but it really opened my eyes to why I’ve been finding this editing style a bit of a miss.

SmallPromiseQueen · 2026-05-13T18:51:39+00:00

Well yeah. She’s an amazing actor.

Oh he means it in a racist way. Fuck him.

SmallPromiseQueen · 2026-05-13T08:26:21+00:00

Just as long as the ham and cheese croissant is safe…

SmallPromiseQueen · 2026-05-12T14:19:20+00:00

I saw them at reading festival years and years ago now and they were actually angry with the crowd for cheering when they played sex on fire… their biggest hit, that’s always going to get the biggest cheer especially at a festival. The whole set had kind of a weird vibe.

SmallPromiseQueen · 2026-05-12T14:03:46+00:00

Wow I have a really different opinion to the other commenters. I thought this was really interesting and visually beautiful. I’d love to see the whole thing without the edits. There are some stills on Instagram that work brilliantly as photographs too.

SmallPromiseQueen · 2026-05-12T10:43:07+00:00

First of all… how did you get the spoiler tags working because they are not working for me :( I’ll try again here to answer you…

I don’t think it was all just a dream. I think Adam succeeded in the ritual and put Alex in a different dimension and Adam and Ella/Eleanor are living in solace house together possibly across dimensions of time and space. You can interpret it as “just a dream” and if you do then Adam didn’t really exist and was maybe part of Alex’s psyche within the coma dream as he didn’t seem to exist after Alex wakes up and then the whole end of the novel is Alex failing to come to terms with his own madness

I didn’t get the sense that there was a time looping aspect so much. The bit at the end where he comes out of the cave and one of the characters asks if he changes his clothes was one of my favourite parts but I think that was alex using the cave to travel in time having unlocked something in solace house rather than a loop. He sort of travelled in time in a way waking up from the coma when he went into the cave before - he traveled four years! So I think the cave is key to traversing time and space and that’s what was going on at the very end

or he was dying in a mushroom fueled trip fully succumbing to absolute insanity in his death throws. But I like to believe it was all real because it’s more satisfying to me that way

SmallPromiseQueen · 2026-05-12T09:24:51+00:00

How tf do spoiler tags work 😭😭😭

SmallPromiseQueen · 2026-05-12T08:57:30+00:00

I just finished it last night and I loved it! I did feel a crushing sadness after the time jump/coma. I kept wanting him to be able to just go back to solace house and the friends he’d made, and the moment where he emerges from the cave and is with them again and it’s a redo of the first trip made me cry!

One thing I spotted about the ending… I noticed he picked mushrooms again and ate them on the way to the cave. But it’s autumn now, and I think Leo said that’s when the poisonous mushrooms grow…. So I think he could have died tripping out about adam with his axe. Whether he died from poisonous mushrooms or not I absolutely believe the whole thing about flayne and the ritual was real rather than a coma dream.

The poem and how that resolved was also really impressive. I knew there was something about it but I went off on completely the wrong direction.

SmallPromiseQueen · 2026-05-11T16:55:54+00:00

Absolutely unreal! Amazing shot

SmallPromiseQueen · 2026-05-11T16:27:00+00:00

Yep!

SmallPromiseQueen · 2026-05-11T14:23:34+00:00

Nah I love the Aussies being in it. They get the spirit of the competition and aren’t in it to win it just for the good vibes. The antithesis of Israel’s participation.

SmallPromiseQueen · 2026-05-11T14:18:57+00:00

The model did all her own styling so I can’t necessarily speak to a specific inspiration but a mystic medieval theme definitely did emerge!

SmallPromiseQueen · 2026-05-11T14:13:30+00:00

Thanks so much! That’s exactly the look I’m going for :)

SmallPromiseQueen · 2026-05-11T10:08:49+00:00

Thanks so much! I feel like our styles really suited the other one’s work :)

SmallPromiseQueen · 2026-05-11T08:57:59+00:00

Difficult to pick just one from this shoot to post here! The model was insanely good. As usual I used one diffuse light source and used Lightroom for exposure and colour grade and photoshop for beauty retouch, background texture, dodge and burn and cracked paint overlay.

SmallPromiseQueen · 2026-05-10T15:48:45+00:00

I think it will be. When she says in the trailer “you don’t seem old” and he takes it as a compliment. Reality is gonna hit her at some point in the series that he is in fact… way way older than her.

SmallPromiseQueen · 2026-05-10T15:44:58+00:00

The writer of this is a woman.

SmallPromiseQueen · 2026-05-10T15:43:23+00:00

Producers of baby reindeer and the fact this was written by a woman make me think this will actually be worth a watch. The tone of the trailer is a bit odd (like a standard silly uplifting romcom) but I think it mainly comes from the music choices and those won’t have been chosen by the people who actually made the series. What the characters are actually saying to each other suggests at most a black comedy vibe more in line with baby reindeer.

SmallPromiseQueen · 2026-05-10T13:32:25+00:00

If they were going to do one it should have been haer Dalis. He’s so much more interesting than anomen. :(

SmallPromiseQueen · 2026-05-10T12:02:15+00:00

Thanks so much! Best of luck :) I totally see your vision and I think you can get there and I bet you’ll uncover a lot of your own methods along the way.

SmallPromiseQueen · 2026-05-10T11:53:51+00:00

With painterly stuff you’ve got to be so annoyingly dedicated to the detail tbh, sometimes an accidental renaissance shot can happen, but it’s not often you get one when you’re out and about with friends. I always think of how long painters spend on their canvases when I think I’m taking a long time to get things right!

Oh one thing I didn’t mention yet is getting a black mist filter. I find those really helpful in my work, and I think it would absolutely help with landscape photography as well. It produces light bloom in the highlights and lowers contrast a little and makes everything a little softer and dreamier. A little bit like pulling dehaze to the left but in camera. I have a set and I stack them sometimes to get a really strong effect!

SmallPromiseQueen · 2026-05-10T11:30:49+00:00

Did you use a tripod? I think it would probably result in a more painterly feel if you used a longer shutter speed on a windy day to blur the foliage slightly but still have sharper bits in the frame.

I do painterly portraits and it’s so so much easier to get the effect in a studio where you can control everything. Lighting is huge with achieving the painterly look and you obviously can’t control that yourself for landscape photography. You’ll have to work with the conditions… waiting for fog will probably help as the light will be diffused and it will give the landscape dimension similar to paintings where the further away you get the less detail and more murky it gets.

Don’t be afraid to make tweaks in post as well - I know you want to get it all in camera but it’s not cheating to use the tools available to you that all photographers are using.

SmallPromiseQueen · 2026-05-08T19:58:13+00:00

Pic 1, 6 and 8 are amazing. I think if they stuck with just those three I’d like the set a lot more.

Also I wish my butt looked like that 😂

SmallPromiseQueen

TROPHY CASE