Hard to believe that we spent two hours shuffling flashes back and forth and changing gels and gobos to get a photograph as simple looking as this one.

Admittedly the ridiculously long hours may be contributed to our inexperience with multiple remote flashes, or maybe to the single malt that played a certain role throughout our experiment.

Anyhow, Andreas came over and we decided to spent the evening getting only one picture. The idea was to capture the mood of an evening spent with a book (and a single malt) by the fireplace.

Available light is nice, but just wouldn’t have cut it. So we place a 580 EX II with a full CTO gel near the fireplace and aimed it towards Andreas.

A second 580 EX II lighter gelled was to the left of Andreas acting as fill light. For my taste it is still a bit to powerful in this picture.

The third flash (a 430 EX II) was lighting the background – particularly the crystal bottles of single malt behind Andreas. I think it was lightly gelled too and had a gobo to prevent light from spilling onto the rest of the scene and the glass plate in front of the fire. But then again there was all this single Malt we had to take care of. I did mention the single malt – didn’t I?

It was after the 17th time I ran around adjusting the power output on all three flashes manually when I decided to buy some PocketWizards as soon as money permits.