Smoke and Fire: The first shoot of the year with Alice Mastino, a model from Italy. It’s always best to choose a theme before hand, so we went for the Little Red Riding Hood. Instead of the basket of fruit we went for a lantern. We shot during a cold January morning so we turned day to night with flash and some lantern trickery – the lantern has very small LED lights, but you can easily fake it in the edit to get a full blast of light. I also wanted a spooky foggy/misty day so added a couple flares from Enola Gaye. The flares or smoke grenades are safe but you still need to careful on dry hot sunny days which was not a problem on this occasion – although a few leaves did die in the making of some images and just be aware of the wind direction i.e. smoke and eyes do not mix well. Alice was looking for some standard portraits mixed with fashion. I always ask ‘models’ to bring a wide and varied collection of clothing and something that really stands out from the crowd – the red jacket goes perfectly with this in mind – she really stands out with the lantern, props are a great addition to any shoot and are gloves it can get cold out there – thanks Alice look forward to more shoots with you in London.

We also captured behind the scenes footage for Smoke and Fire on 4K video.