I'm lucky enough to live close to a great nature reserve, Storforsen, it's a huge waterfall and big area of amazing beauty with lots of pools and flowing water amongst huge granite bolders, beautiful place. There's a fantastic shop there full of local crafts, clothing, art, souvenirs and lots more, I have photographed the owner Birgitta on a couple of occasions now and when she started work on her new webshop, I was really happy that she asked me to take a couple of shots for her.

The shop has a great feel to it, it's rich and warm and cosy feeling full of interesting things and colours, the plan was to try and capture that in a single shot. The tricky thing from a photography point of view was the light or more importantly the sheer number and variety of light sources! There's firelight, daylight, reflected light through glass, lamps as well as overhead lights and darker areas, balancing all of this was going to be really tricky, or so I thought. It turns out that the best solution was to use the Profoto B1 head with the modelling lamp on full power and use a longer exposure, the B1 modelling lamp is daylight balanced so it just created natural looking light on the right hand side of this shot, mimicking window light to balance the left hand side.

We had a fairly overcast day which allowed an exposure of 1 second without blowing highlights, the B1 was mounted up high on the far right to balance and apart from a slight tweak to the white balance in post, this is as shot. I think we managed to maintain the "feel" and warmth of the space.

Second we needed a really nice shot of Birgitta, something to show her natural warmth plus add some of the great colours and products from the shop in the background, I wanted a really rich feel to the shot. I kept the depth of field as small as possible to give emphasis to Birgitta and allow some separation from the background but I wanted the items to still be recognisable. 

I used a single Profoto B1 with a beauty dish and grid, camera right and fairly close to Birgitta, I like the shot as it captures the warmth I was aiming for.

Check out Birgitta's new webshop and if you get chance, visit the real shop! http://www.storforsenshop.com/en-GB/about-21170759