There is a special kind of creative freedom in a test shoot. And that is both amazing and scary: "what do I do?..."

"Relax, this is a chance to pull one of those ideas out of the drawer and finally make it come to life!" — That's what I said to myself a few days before this shoot.

I'd been wanting to play with color gels and this was the perfect opportunity.

My challenge was to get as close to the final result as possible, in terms of color, in the studio and I think I managed that (check out the before & after of one of the images — the one on the left is straight out of the camera).

So on the day of the shoot I set out to make some nice portraits with some interesting colors, but I got a lot more than that. My beautiful model Funmi (@thefunmiofficial) delivered character, emotion and flow, breathing life into every picture!

A portrait is truly a collective endeavor — I can only get so far from my end of the camera.