A portrait shoot organised with Sony — a room, a run of models, two cameras, and a day built to push the work forward.

I do these deliberately. Paid jobs keep you sharp on the things you already know; a session like this is where you get to test something new while the stakes are low and the standard stays high. I brought the Canon R1 for stills and the C400 for motion and ran both off one lighting setup, which is a discipline in itself — the film has to grade to the stills, and the stills have to cut into the film.

Coloured seamless, one hard key, a warm rim through the hair to lift the subject off the background. Then the actual work: getting someone you met four minutes ago to stop performing.

It produced some of my favourite portrait work to date and a 54-second film out of the same session. I take every one of these I can get — new rooms, new faces, new problems to solve are the whole reason I still love this.

DIRECTOR & PHOTOGRAPHER: JASON KNIGHT · CANON R1 (STILLS) + CANON C400 (MOTION) · ORGANISED WITH SONY