So what happens when a good friend finally bites the bullet and sits still for 150 minutes to endure the pain of placing a permanent design on his skin?

Firstly, you thank your lucky stars that you did not get sucked into doing it as well.

Secondly, you offer to take a few shots if he’s interested.

Thirdly, don’t punch him on the arm!

As luck would have it, the opportunity to take shots on the day the ink was done allowed me a chance to kill a few birds with one stone.

Let me tell you all about it.

I’d recently purchased a number of David Honl’s speedlite modifiers.

These little beauties are awesomely useful, and are sure to come in handy for small flash work

http://www.expoimaging.net/product-detail.php?cat_id=10&product_id=18&keywords=Honl_Photo_Grids,_Gobos,_Snoots_and_Gels

As with most relatively new products, New Zealand is generally near the back of the queue to get stock (That’s assuming NZ even knows about it), and it’s been a long and impatient wait to get hold of these new toys.

The vision in my head gave me a chance to experiment with the grid spot and snoot, as I wanted a point light source focused on the tattoo itself.

I eventually settled on the snoot to do this, with a large softbox as my mainlight and a 3rd strobe modified with barndoors as my separation light.

The shoot also allowed me an opportunity to try something different as far as post processing goes.

For this I owe a HUGE thank you to Zack Arias for an awesome video tutorial (Available as a podcast) which showed me a far more efficient and time-saving way of finalising my images.

http://www.zarias.com/?p=201

The hard thing about being self taught is the way you constantly beat yourself up about the rate at which you are learning.

There is no easy way to overcome this; getting better generally requires you to bump your head a lot, and then to spend time figuring out how to improve on what you got wrong.

On the flip-side though, there are times when things just seem to gel, and instead of striking it lucky, you actually get results that you planned from the start.

This was one of those moments.

Now on to the next brick wall, armed with a pocketful of paracetamol and a smile on my face…