Like Martin, Only More Spartan

After seeing the Martin Prihoda Delirium video recently, fellow west-coaster Andrew Jorgensen decided to see if he could get close to the look with a trio of speedlights.

Light is light, and if you can find ways to allow for the differences in power levels, you can do many things with your speedlights that the Big Boys do with their Profotos.

Jorgensen shot four guys from "djHere," a San Diego-based promotions company, for an article in Pacific Magazine. The location was Shelter Island, near San Diego.

He used a Nikon D300, with two SB-800's and a an SB-24. He set one of the SB-800's to slave to the others using the SU-4 slave hack.

That's actually not what the SU-4 mode is really for, but it works great. He used a splitter to sync the other two strobes via one Pocket Wizard. I would have probably just PW'd he SB-24 and set both SB-800's to slave to save running a wire. But his way worked fine, too.


Here's the setup. Even more than the idea of translating Profotos down to speedlights, I like love the Voice-Activated Boom he used to get his main light, shooting through an umbrella, high enough to shoot under it with no stand in the way.

He came fairly close, but was not able to get his backlights high enough because of the distance involved. No secrets there, you just need taller stands, closer distances (for a better angle) or more voice-activated light stand extenders.

Australian photographer Brendan O'Shea used the same triangle light (all small Sunpaks) to shoot the group, "Modern Legion" in an alleyway. (His was done in late March.)

Like Jorgensen, he used a little post work to pop it. Seems to work well for this light. And to O'Shea's credit, he not only was very close to Pihroda's look, but was out there before even seeing that video on the big light technique.

Just two quick examples to show that the idea of looking at the big light stuff and translating down to speedlights can work. You just have to be able to make accommodations for the differences in power.
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Related Links:

:: Andrew Jorgensen's Flickr Page ::
:: Brendan O'Shea's Flickr Page ::
:: Original Martin Pihroda Video ::