​Is it possible for a whole to pass without the proclamation of a special week….? Probably not as doughnut week was celebrated a few days ago.

Purely by coincidence I thought I’d have a go at a very cliché and nerdy aspect of photography… high-speed flash. You know the shots, balloons frozen in mid air, bursting with water, or light bulb being shot at, exploding everywhere.

Well I wanted to try something, hopefully a little bit more relevant and classy….
Here we have the flying doughnut hitting its sugary bed of loveliness.

I set the shot up with Denise Smart, who, apart from being a very close friend, is one of the best food stylists in the business.

We played with salad in the morning and it sort of worked…ish…. But really we both wanted to get onto the main event, beautiful yummy doughnuts. Denise made the dough and piped the jam and then a sort of sticky baseball ensued. Denise would throw and I would shoot and then we swapped around. We got through twenty doughnuts and a lot of sugar and we both felt marginally sweetly sick by the end but I think we got there… What do you think?

Technical bits and bobs:
We hired (from Calumet Photo) a Profoto B4 1000 Air pack and shot two heads on their lowest setting. The images were taken in relative darkness and I used a Nikon D4 on continuous high mode. Here’s my favourite; it’s been re-touched just a little.