Lea 7

Archive, with pain
Five or six years ago I was updating a backup of the HD on which I kept all my model work: in the middle of the backup the source drive failed, and in such a way that the backup drive was also trashed. Although I had some stuff on CDs (which are, from experience, a very volatile medium) most of the previous five years' work was lost.
I paid £1700 to a recovery specialist, who reconstructed the original HD .. rebuilding a new HD around the damaged disks, with new motor, new read / write heads. I checked the folders they had recovered, full of thumbnails, and they sent full-res versions of several; all this so I would decide whether or not to pay their fee and take what they'd got. I paid, and many of the images were only thumbnails. Not their fault, just how i was. It's one of the reasons I stopped shooting models entirely for several years; only in the last year or so have I been able to start again, very slowly. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you strong? Bullshit.
It was unbelievably painful .. it still is. For about three years I couldn't bring myself to look at the recovered stuff at all. It's still very very difficult, but about once a year now I work up the courage (or despair) to take another brief look. Scanning empty folders today I found one with images of Lea, in which many of the images were full-size and ok. Shot on a D70, so 6Mp max.
Looking at them now is hellishly bittersweet. Some are better than I remember, which itself is bittersweet, because I am SO rusty now, and frankly don't think I could do work this good again. I regret having lost touch with so many great models, but I love seeing with fresh eyes how good they were .. how beautiful and how talented .. and there are great memories of how happy a time a shoot could be.
Anyway, here are several images of Lea. I haven't done anything to the original edits except resize.