So I'm getting quite a bug for flash photography. Like using the pen tool or luminosity masks, I managed to avoid it for quite some time. Now I've started I'm not sure why I left it so long.

After working with the brilliant Nikita Caslida at Gavin Taylor's recent lighting workshop I got in contact and asked if we could do a shoot at our local studio, Studio2. 

I can't pretend to be an expert at flash yet. There was a lot of faffing and cursing as I tried to set things up, but there was a greater confidence behind all my mistakes. Even if I wasn't getting it right I was less scared to man handle the lights and try things out.

I am eternally grateful to Nikita for her patience. 

I assumed the finished pieces would be close to 'straight out of camera', only I started digging around my old folders of textures (papers, rusty tins, baking trays, etc...) and things just kind of took off from there and I'm loving the results. Although there's similarities between the set I challenged myself to make every picture different. I haven't spent time with textures for a while and it was good to go back to old working methods, applying new learnt techniques. 

There's more to come, but here's the results so far...

In the meantime, it's back to practising frequency separation techniques. There's always something to learn :)