Courtney Smith
You'll never believe it but I once got arrested! I guess everyone has a brush with the law at some stage or another but mine was a completely innocent mistake that resulted in a very tricky situation.
I'm very lucky that my job as a fashion stylist allows me to travel the world for work. I have shot campaigns and editorials in the Sharjah desert in Dubai, a safari camp in Oman, an elephant sanctuary in Plettenberg Bay, the streets of Miami Beach, the rivers of Venice, a boat on Lake Como… all usually without any major drama to report, apart from the odd angry model or a make-up artist not turning up.
We were shooting a pretty, simple beach scene with Nedine Vos, who is a former Miss South Africa. In comparison to other shoots it should have been a walk in the park. The idea was to use the sandy and earthy tones in the clothes and keep the shoot very clean and soft - there were no massive sets, no animals, and no location changes to contend with.
We were working with a local hair and make-up team who helped us find a great spot on Noordhoek beach in Cape Town, which has a shipwreck on it.
Noordhoek Beach is more than 8km long, and is the most unspoiled and best-protected on the Atlantic Cape coast. It was a perfect location. We had a generic permit to shoot on the Cape Town beaches but what we didn't realise was we had driven down the coast a little too far and were actually in the National Park's territory.
We were mid-shooting when three burly police officers started walking towards us on the beach. They were quite intimidating and asked us to produce our permit; which was in our car, about a 15-minute walk away.
As we were walking along with them to the car they told us we were on protected national parkland and they needed to see our special permit, one we didn't have - and had never heard of, may I add. Rather than show our basic permit that was apparently incorrect, I decided to play dumb and pretend we had left the permit in the apartment we were staying in, which was an hour away, hoping they might just let us off.
Oh how wrong I was.
At this point they asked who was in charge of the shoot, which was myself and Daniel Holfeld the photographer, and told us that we had broken the law and they would have to arrest us and fine us.
Trying my best to fix the situation, I tried to offer the officers a payment instead of us having to go to the police station, thinking they might be swayed to take cash in hand and let us go. I had heard that this wasn't uncommon over there and was worth a shot… It didn't go down well.
Since there were too many of us to take in the squad car, one officer sat in our car and escorted us to the police station, led in front by the squad car.
Naturally, we were upset and shocked - not only were we being arrested but the fashion shoot was only three shots in and we were losing natural light.
The station was about a 45-minute drive away and while everyone else sat in silence I tried my best to flirt with the police officer. I am a natural-born flirt and probably unaware of it most of the time, but this time it was tactical flirting. (I had once seen my mum do this to get off a speeding fine with a garda so was following her lead!)
I wasn't really getting much reaction but just as we pulled up to the station the police officer turned to me and said they were just going to fine us and let us go because the cells were overcrowded. He also whispered to me that there was another beach called Long Beach about 20 minutes up the road, which was out of their jurisdiction, and we could go there and finish our shoot and we wouldn't be bothered. Result!
We were in the police station for about an hour filling out forms and giving our fingerprints, we then paid the fine and headed to Long Beach.
After a long sigh of relief, the team spent the rest of the day cracking jokes about "doing time", my outrageous flirting, my badly judged attempt at bribery and how it was the scariest and weirdest experience any of us had ever had on a fashion shoot before.
Now, every time I look at the photos it makes me laugh how such a bizarre day had unfolded behind such beautiful images.
In the end we got charged with trespassing and since then we always make a joke that there was no limit for us to get the perfect shot - even if it means trespassing and getting arrested.
