Last Saturday Cristiano and I met up with Carlo, Fabiana and their friend Daniel in Portobello Road. Fabiana made this cool photo of me:

Melinda by Fabiana Zonca on Flickr.

I like how the shadows play on my skin and how everything is dark except me. I want to say I was thinking of something insightful or ’searching my soul’ (as I call this picture), but to be honest: most probably I’m trying to figure out what tiles on the ground I should step on.

Do you ever play that game where you just sit somewhere, watch people and try to create their back stories? This photo somehow catches that type of game for me. I can keep staring at it, wondering what each person in it was wondering at the time.

Much to my amazement when I wanted to step on my balcony this afternoon, I discovered this:

Yes, that’s a squirrel. A freaking cute small squirrel asleep in my beanbag. A squirrel. Asleep. In my beanbag. How cute is that?! I’ve never seen a sleeping squirrel before, let alone one in a beanbag! By accident I then woke the little thing up and it jumped away, but a few minutes later it was back. Eyes shut and sleeping peacefully:

These pictures (and a couple more photos up on Flickr) don’t do it justice; you can actually see it breathing heavily as if it was snoring. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had gotten closer that it was doing just that (cats snore, so why not squirrels?). I didn’t want to open the door and step out, cause I’m sure it would have ran away then. It’s dark now outside, but it’s still there.

With the pigeon nest (I’ll come around to that in another blog post) in the other corner, this balcony is turning out to be quite the wildlife shelter. What’s next, I wonder?

By now you should know I love Annie Leibovitz’s photography. I just recently discovered these two photo spreads picturing the Wizard of Oz and Hitchcock movies. The first set is from December 2005 and features Keira Knightley as Dorothy Gale. If you want to see all the images, take a look at the slideshow.

The second set just came out this week and features a wide collection of current day actors posing in iconic Hitchcock scenes. I love these two with Jodie Foster in The Birds and Marion Cotillard in Psycho. Check out FirstShowing for more Hitchcock.

Update: Apparently though they are not from Annie Leibovitz. (I misread the other article). Still they are beautiful photos.

These photos from Annie Leibovitz are just stunning. They belong to the Dream Portrait Serie, an advertisement campaign from Disney featuring celebrities as traditional Disney characters. The first three images came out in January 2007, the second batch of three in October 2007 and the latest four came out this week. I’ve featured the photos I like the best first; while most of them are cool, there are a couple that just don’t work for me.

Where Every Cinderella Story Comes True

Scarlett Johansson as Cinderella

Where You’re The Fairest Of Them All

Rachel Weisz as Snow White

Where Dreams Run Free

Jessica Biel as Pocahontas

Where You’re Always The King Of The Court

Roger Federer as King Arthur

Where You Never Have To Grow Up

Mikhail Baryshnikov as Peter Pan, Gisele Bündchen as Wendy and Tina Fey as Tinkerbell

Where Imagination Saves The Day

David Beckham as Prince Phillip from Sleeping Beauty

Where The Magic Begins

Julie Andrews as the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio and Abigial Breslin as Fira from Disney Fairies

Where A Whole New World Awaits

Jennifer Lopez as Jasmine and Marc Anthony as Aladdin

Where Wonderland Is Your Destiny

Beyonce as Alice, Lyle Lovett as the March Hare and Oliver Platt as the Mad Hatter

Where Your Every Wish Is Our Command

Whoopi Goldberg as the Genie

(Photos courtesy and copyright of Disney)