One of my favourite clients is Box Hill Institute. I have worked closely with them for years to get the best value out of my time it is not uncommon to shoot 3000+ frames over a day. They have a great presence in the global market of education and have an insatiable need for imagery for their many publications. 95% the imagery is portraits, and mostly my favourites, environmental portraits. Recently we did a series on a tight deadline of the nominees for student of the year.

The first shot I have posted here uses one of the features that originally attracted me to Speedlights, the High Speed Sync. The beauty of this feature isthat you can shoot with a flash through a softbox, with flash, and a very shallow depth of field. This shot was shot at 1/400 at f4.5.

Paul Fiddian from Equestrian shot using High Speed Sync

For James’s shot we only had a small electrical cupboard to shoot inside of. The speedlights proved essential allowing me to light James with a softbox tucked behind the wall with a tungsten gel, a SB900 bouncing into the ceiling of small room with a tungsten gel to illuminate the electricals, an SB900 on the floor to the left to create some techno fill, and lastly a bounced SB800 into the roof to give a night time feel to the outside room.

James Arundle checking wiring lit by speedlights in a tiny room

And lastly for this post, Matt the mechanic. For this shot, I lit Matthew with a gelled softbox and had 3 other flashes pumping light into the light absorbing environment and used 3 of  David Honl’s light modifiers to cut possible flare.

Matthew Beavis lit by 4 speedlights