I attended a shoot with a totally different mindset – on two different fronts:
(1) To shoot in Black & White.
(2) To not prepare like I always do, so no moodboards,etc…

The first aspect of shooting mono was fairly easy. I’d seen many images of Faye, the model, and she really suits the mono treatment. Technically, I set the camera to shoot RAW + JPEG, and set the camera to shoot mono. This gave me a mono image on the camera viewfinder and also gave me the full colour RAW version for subsequent processing. By shooting in mono it presented the back of camera image as a series in greys from black to white, so seeing where shadows fell and highlights occurred was quite easy to monitor.

The second aspect to just turn up with no prior communications, no ideas shared with the model was a real challenge to me though. With my comfort blanket of preparation removed I was not quite sure how I was to proceed as I still expected to come away with a good set of images. So we kind of made it up as we went along, with regular pauses whilst I wondered “what next?”. The set produced turned out to be quite dark in nature and also in tone, a few can be seen below and more can be seen here (NSFW).