The first shoot of the new year so I thought we could go back to a favourite place of mine just south of Cousin Lane in London. Towards the end of this lane, you can keep going south and you will eventually find yourself knee-deep in the River Thames… if you keep going you will be neck deep.

I was clever and stayed dry by only walking down the steps to the beach. Today I was with Marquissa Darq dressed as a cross between Beetlejuice and the Joker, more on that connection later!

We started off walking to the east where I noticed there had been a lot of work done to shore up the beachfront since I was last here. We found a lot of clay pipe stems lying around but no bowls this time.

The green of the wall was a great contrast to the black and white costume Marquissa was wearing. We could not go too much further without falling into the Thames so I had Marquissa stand between two metal towers to frame her for the next shot.

Now back to the Joker connection. Everyone by now must have seen the iconic shot of Joaquin Phoenix dancing on the stairs in New York, if not then just Google ‘Joaquin phoenix joker stairs’ so see what I mean. Well, I may have the equivalent here, so I present the Marquissa Darq Beetlejuice/Joker stairs!

Am I going to be responsible for hoards of tourists flocking to these stairs like they do in New York? No…probably not but Marquissa had fun!

After all that stair dancing Marquissa had to recline for a bit and do a few stretches before we moved on!

After a couple, more at the stairs, we moved on the rusty barge which is right next to the stairs. Last time I was here I was using this to shelter under from a sudden hail storm! No such weather this time luckily. The barge and the wall make a great corridor for the next shot, here again, I noticed the timbers on the wall had been replaced since last time. Seems a bit of urban renewal has been going on.

Love this final shot of the day, the depth of field using the Sony 85mm f1.8 lens is very apparent here and the A7iii Eye detect worked so well on this shoot!

Thanks to Marquissa for the shoot and the chat in Starbucks afterwards!