Alastair lives in a classic 1970s concrete block in the City of London and he is a business consultant specialising in arts organisations. The day that I went to shoot his picture was cold, wet, windy and wild in a way that only British towns seem to manage so spectacularly. Even at midday the light was poor and so I had plenty of scope for shooting flash with daylight. Down in the walkways their was some shelter from the wind and so we set up to shoot this series of shots in the calmest spot. The idea was to have a very strong shadow running up the wall with a second light filling in his face a little. If there had been no wind, I would have used a large softbox for the fill light but that wasn't possible and so I left both Elinchrom Ranger Quadra heads with just their standard reflectors. The shot was never planned to include the light on the stand that you can see on the right of the frame but as I messed about with ideas and composition this worked pretty well.

The two sockets on the Quadra pack are asymmetric. That means that whichever head is plugged into the "A" socket will deliver twice the power of the one in the "B" socket. In this shot the "A" head is directly in front of the subject about 2.5 metres (8 feet) away from him and slightly above his eyeline. The pack was set to 50 w/s which means that the "B" head (the one you can see) was only giving out 25 w/s and acting as a highlight down the subjects left hand side.

The exposure at ISO 200 was 1/8th of a second at f9 which allowed me to deliberately move the camera during the exposure to get the small amount of daylight in the frame to blur nicely without affecting the area lit by the flash which would still have been between three and four f-stops under exposed without the flash. The lens used was a Canon 24-70 f2.8L on an EOS5D MkII and the flash wa triggered using the Elinchrom Skyport system.

There were of course plenty of other images in the set. One or two of them are under consideration for a portfolio update some time in the new year and of course Alastair has a several for his own use. Here are a couple of other examples: