I love being a professional photographer for shoots like this: a dark, lurid basement, fun clients and an immovable deadline. It fits with my instinct that good art needs limitations to force new techniques and insights.

The brief was an editorial / advertising shoot for Stacked and PKR, shot on location at the PKR studios in London. What I hadn't quite realised until we arrived at 2:30pm was that their commentary show was airing at 4pm and we couldn't be popping flash bulbs on the airwaves after that time. Eek!

So eschewing our usual deliberations over cigars and Malibu, we set up a 5' brolly in the corner to give a soft but directional light throughout the room, and then adjusted speedlights on-the-fly as rim-lights and fills when needed. This gives both versatility and speed. The brolly was triggered by a long sync cable from the camera and everything else left as slaves, triggered by the initial flash.

The idea was to do an advertising image but take the studio out into the wild so I hired a Mini Cooper S, called my assistant Pat (www.pathall.co.uk) and headed 179.61 miles down the M4 to Brecon, Mid-Wales.

That's the short version... unsurprisingly it took shitloads of planning: the route, car hire, insurance, accommodation, shot sketches, lighting sketches, lighting, rigs, video, cameras, etc, etc, etc. All told, give it a week.

We set off on the Friday afternoon and arrived in Brecon in the dark around 10pm. The next morning we got up at 4am, in the dark, and drove out for the sunrise shots beside the Usk reservoir.

This is the rough strobist setup for the second shot:

We were fortunate because a week later the whole area was deluged and the Usk burst it's banks. Some things you can't plan for huh? I had reckoned on it raining heavily though, which was the main reason for getting a Nikon D700 - I was lucky enough to assist on a shoot for BMW a couple of years ago (also in Wales) and was amazed that the photographer Tim Andrew was shooting with a $5000 D3 in t-o-r-r-e-n-t-i-a-l rain. The D700 was not $5000 but does have the same weatherproofing. The SB900 flashes aren't so hardy so there were a few zip-lock bags and Post-Office elastic bands knocking about too. Other precautions were a backup camera, sandbags to hold down the rigs in high winds and batteries galore. The total cost of the shoot was ~£600.

The Usk location was really done by 9am, which gave us plenty of time to drive the few hours west up into the Black Mountains, which was the highlight of the whole trip.

The last shot there was taken around 10pm and with hindsight we should have driven back to London then.

The following day we were pretty tired and couldn't match the momentum of the first. But that's what these test shoots are all about - making all the mistakes you'll know to avoid next time when the client is paying. Like, say, this one...

Käthe Kollwitz: Tod und Frau (Death and Woman), 1910.

Over the weekend I saw a great exhibition of German Expressionism and the way it was curated gives an interesting insight into the development of thought and expression over time.

Expressionism was born from a desire to infuse the progressive techniques of Impressionism with greater depths of feeling. A good case study is Käthe (Katya) Kollwitz, whose 'Peasant War' series typifies the combination of impressionistic technique with emotional weight.

Käthe Kollwitz: Die Gefangenen ('The Prisoners'), 1908.

What the exhibition noted though, is that within the techniques and emotion, the characters are Rodinesque, and overall, the scenes are idealistic. On a chart of human development, this era before WWI seems adolescent; it's courting emotional depth, but lacks the experience to avoid formulaic expressions and caricatures.

Unfortunately, true originality and pure expression only emerged from the Dantean horror of WWI. For Kollwitz, this meant the death of her youngest son Peter and a wilderness of years before her Krieg ('War') cycle in 1922-23.

Käthe Kollwitz: Das Opfer ('The Sacrifice'), 1922.

Whichever era one prefers, I think it has to be said that Kollwitz's suffering gave her a unique clarity of principle to create art which was truly the offspring of her heart rather than her education.

If I thought it before, it's even clearer now, that art and advertising cannot mix - they are different domains with different objectives and to be genuine, my personal photography projects have to either be one or the other. 

For all the strobists, this is a basic studio setup, which suffices for the majority of my editorial work in London.

Behind the trace on the left is a 'monobloc' flash head, usually with a common 8" reflector on it, which I'll move away to make the trace into a softbox or close in as a soft spotlight. The versatility is amazing, especially because I could be shooting a usb stick, then a tft, followed by an inflatable mushroom followed by 30 more heterogeneous devices. The overhead softbox is on an extendible boom, so is cranked and creaked around but pretty much stays where it is.

The camera itself is a Sinar 4x5 with a Phase One digital back sitting on what could easily be replaced by a ball-head, were it not for the tilt and shift bellows, which need separate adjustments. The major benefit of such a contraption for me is that focal length can be very, very short. Otherwise, gimme a Hasselblad!

The three cards on the table act as flags or reflectors where necessary and one, all or t'other are used on most shots. The battered paint tin (which I'm sure will explode one day) is to elevate screens and things so the table edge isn't visible in them. The rest of the stuff is for cleaning fingerprints, marking edges of similar items and the spirit-level is to keep the camera flat.

In such a fast-paced, commercial studio, the reality is that most shots are done with variations of this basic setup. Soon I'll post something for an intro or advertising shoot.

Me in my natural habitat, doing a 360 for Monkey, a mannequin and a few overhead shots, then ~20 still-lives in the afternoon for PC Pro. There were a couple of firsts here, like using my own camera in the studio to do the time-lapse, and also using the SB900 speedlights as slaves, having finally worked out how to do it! I hope to do another one soon when there's a more interesting setup.

It has taken me a t-o-r-t-u-o-u-s full English day to get this from my laptop to YouTube to Squarespace. £500 Photoshop CS3 was useless and in the end I've discovered that the easiest way to convert / compile a series of still images or time-lapse into a movie is using Windows Movie Maker (WMM) of all things (free with Windows).

I'm using XP and over the course of the day, installed, tried and eventually given up on Gimp, VLC, Bridge CS3, Photoshop CS3, Webcam Flix and various other odds and sods before happening upon WMM. The only drawback is that it only outputs WMV or AVI files, which are proprietary and enormous respectively, but aside from that it's free and very easy to use.

To compile a time-lapse:

1. Open WMP

2. Making sure that the 'Tasks' panel is visible, click on 'Import Pictures' from Menu 1, 'Capture Video'.

3. Navigate to your files, select them all and click 'Import'. (NOTE: the images must be numbered sequentially (e.g. filename1.jpg, filename2.jpg, etc...)).

4. The images will now show in the Collections panel. Select them all (Ctrl + A) and drag them down into the storyboard. The resulting movie can be previewed in the viewing panel on the right and enhanced with titles, credits and transitions from the Tasks panel.

5. For the highest quality and resolution, click on 'Save to my computer', under '3. Finish Movie' on the Tasks panel. Click the 'Other Settings' radio button and navigate down to 'DV-AVI (PAL)', click Next and complete the wizard. 

Most video sites like YouTube need a compressed format like MP4 so I downloaded Any Video Converter to convert from AVI to MP4.

See it in-situ in Monkey 164, pg22.

Contrast this with the philosophy that the image is outside the camera, in the mind of the photographer. Broadly, the distinction is between a scientist and an artist.

I'm starting to see though, that there is a further, parallel distinction between photographers who capture and photographers who contrive. The former look for the 'decisive moment', which must be hunted and captured but often escapes the shutter. The latter are not hunters, but farmers, who try to cultivate a decisive moment themselves by creating the scene, hiring the models, etc.

Hunters and farmers both have to learn the technicalities, but not every hunter will be Cartier Bresson, nor will every farmer be Eugenio Recuenco. To graduate is to go from being a scientist to being an artist going beyond the lens to the world outside and waiting patiently to capture or intelligently contriving their own decisive image.

Can someone sum this up better for me?! And in photography or any other profession, what are you? A hunter? A farmer? Does your character predict it, or determine it? Comments below. :)

This is a friend's grandfather; a Serbian pilot photographed around the 1920s. It's the first archival retouch I've done so I'm putting this up not really as an example of how to do it, but just to say, well, I did it this way.

Here are the steps:

1. Right-click the original jpg in Adobe Bridge and open in Camera Raw (ACR). Convert to DNG using the Save-As dialogue, and reopen to adjust basic exposure, clarity and white balance.

2. Open the image into Photoshop and clone out the blemishes using the patch, healing and clone tools.

3. Use the pen tool to isolate different areas of the image, select and feather the path before applying a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer.

While retouching the image, I noticed a strange white block down the pilot's left side. I thought it was something regimental (a sword?!) until my wife Chino said, "That background's fake though, isn't it?", which I hadn't even considered, but the more I look at it, the more it does seem that he is standing in front of a picture. Photomontage, even then!

A while back I wanted to see what I could do with a mobile phone picture taken while assisting the wildly talented and entertaining Mitch Pashavair on a shoot for Toyota in mid-Wales.

The raw material was this runt, brought into the world by a Nokia 6288 2mp rig...

The first trick is a Photoshop plugin from Flaming Pear called Flood, which I used for the river. The splash was taken from an image bought from iStock:

Here's a low-res gif of the full retouching process: