I freely admit that I am not, generally speaking, a subtle photographer. You don’t really have to spend much time looking at most of my photos and pondering “But is it … art?” I like big and brash and fun and crazy and romantic and daring and colorful and … you get the picture.
So I guess you’d think that the first shot I’d post with my new toy, the three-flash set-up I call The Sledgehammer of Light, that I really would have gone nuclear, right?
OK, if it had been a sunny day, I probably would have. But it wasn’t, and so I went with the murkiness to create an image with a feel of mystery. One of the other great things about the Sledgehammer of Light is that you can trigger it in full CLS mode, which means syncing to 1/8000th of a second … which means the shallow depth-of-field of shooting at f/1.4 with flash outdoors. Usually when you try that trick, the flash power gets *really* weak by 1/8000th. But, of course, we have three of them, enough for a subtle kiss of light from a distance.
by Ryan Brenizer
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