Another shoot with the lovely Miriam O’Callaghan. She always looks so glamorous, I thought we’d go for a low key, very natural look this time and focus on Miriam’s amazing cheekbones and eyes. As always, she was the true professional, very down to earth and cooperative and before you know it, you’re telling her all your innermost secrets! Time was tight as Hot Press were going to print later that day. We started at 2pm and I had to shoot, edit, upload proofs and send in the final images by 6pm. Hot Press is out now!

I really enjoyed this shoot with Paul Martin. It makes all the difference to the final images if the subject gets involved and game to try a few things. It didn’t hurt that he looked great too, very stylish, slim and dark.

The book on fire was Paul’s idea. He has just been made the editor of The Irish Sunday Mirror (the youngest ever) having previously been the Showbiz correspondent and this was him burning his contacts book with all the stories he couldn’t tell!

The smoke and flames are real. We had to work quickly before the flames reached Paul’s hand. I did a test first with flash, but the intensity of the flash overpowered the flames and made them completely invisible. So I turned off the flash heads altogether and just used the modelling light and a high ISO on the camera and that worked.