Assigned to shoot backstage first looks for a week in Berlin. As there was a team of us shooting the usual blanket coverage for the organisers of the event we had some pretty good access.

I’ve done this kind of work before, shooting mainly available light during Istanbul, London and Moscow back stage areas however this time around I was forced to deploy a slightly different tactic.

I’m a reactionary photographer, so surroundings, available space and  existing lighting scenarios dictate the strategies I deploy to hopefully get some decent frames. So, whilst scoping out the areas I was going to work in for the entire week, it began to dawn on me from a technical point of view that I wasn't going to be able to work well with available light. Washing down from above the back stage area a row of nasty industrial tungsten was bleaching the tops of heads and rendering faces with long shadows and deep dark eye sockets on even the most stunning faces. Against this very contingency of disgusting light, I’d dragged along a couple of pretty cool gadgets from ‘The Trick Bag’ which I used for the full 6 days.

So with a combination of tact, cunning and repetitive strain injury I set about bringing unto the world a set of frames to accurately represent the backstage area of Berlin’s Fashion Week.

Here’s a few frames from the gig.

The last frame sums up how I felt at the end of six very, very long days.