Image Focus

Caught in a creative knot at the start of 2025, Nicholas Mastoras needed something to spark his imagination, so he set himself a project and a target to work on it at least once a month. “It was a commitment,” he remembers, “a way of focusing my energy into something I could completely control and an important way to balance my commercial work.”

The subject which untangled his creativity was, ironically, hair. “Hair is something so important in human culture, but it rarely gets to be the real focus of photography,” he explains, “and although it’s often a relatively minor part of a portrait, its connotations are immense. In Greek culture alone, hair has had myriad meanings: it reveals wealth and social status, shows sexuality, strength, or stands for sacrifice and protection. It’s tied to ritual and rights of passage, and ever-present in allegory and myth.”

Now in full flow, one of Nicholas’s favourite images from the project “has a real Medusa vibe about it,” he says. The shot is part of a series made with actress Tonia Sotiropoulou, hair designer Stella Soulele and make-up artist Panagiotis Karakasis. “It’s an image where she looks beautiful, but there’s also this chaos,” he continues. “It’s not like a regular portrait, where hair is often precisely controlled, it’s free and energetic, even chaotic, with the strands twirling and snaking around her face.”

Nicholas made the image in his studio, with hair piled on Tonia’s head and extra strands added so that it filled the edges of the frame, encircling her face. “Next,” he explains, “we used fans to blow it around, with Tonia moving to let the hair lift and whirl around her features.”

Lighting the image with a single flash in a large softbox, Nicholas placed his light just in front of Tonia’s face where it would give the softest illumination and used his Sony Alpha 7R V in its 5fps burst mode to make sure he had plenty of frames to choose from. “I didn’t want to shoot too fast,” he says, “but I was certainly waiting for that one image, where the hair was in the perfect position.”

Using an FE 24-70mm f/2.8 GM II, he framed close-up, centring the composition on her eyes, with the camera’s ultra-reliable tracking autofocus making sure her lashes were sharp, even despite the hair blowing around.

“Setting the lens to an aperture of f/8 brought the maximum sharpness,” he continues, “and along with the speed of the flash, it shows off all the texture in the hair and the fine details in her skin. And it’s all enhanced by the Alpha 7R V’s incredible resolution, so when I make a print I and exhibit the image along with others from the series, I know it’s going to look amazing.”

With his project continuing to deliver creatively, Nicholas has clearly seen the benefit. “Photographers need this kind of release,” he says. “I love my work assignments, but there’s nothing like the unbound creativity of a project like this. It’s literally like letting your hair down.”