Hellena Koval: The Best Model I Ever Shot With
Hellena Koval is the best model I ever shot with. She rocked up on the back of a motorbike, 7am, all done up, ready to go. It was an early-morning beach shoot. We were in Seminyak in Bali.
Hellena is from Moldova. Moldova borders Ukraine. She was in Bali to escape the war.
I had a Sony A1 with me. I wanted to shoot video. Actually, I wanted to shoot beautiful video. Morning, a beach, 4K. Helena totally got it. I hardly had to say anything. She just got it.
She got it, with a stranger, at 7am, on a foreign beach. That’s not bad. I lost contact with her immediately after, as you do. But three years later I was cleaning up some files on my desktop, and I found her instagram handle. It’s @hellena.koval. The first thing I saw, when I looked at her instagram, was the most incredible video-reel of Hellena riding shotgun on the back of an iron ore train in a dessert. That made me smile. That is so Hellena Koval. The world is there and she strides it. In the next post I looked at she was flicking through her passport. It had stamps from dozens of countries, if not more. Life. She's having one.
Just like that. Needless to say that the images, or rather than video, of that brief photoshoot on Seminyak Beach are A-Class. I actually didn’t take any photographs: all the above are grabs from the video. A short version of the video is on the site. The longer version is on YouTube.
