We mulled over the cover of this book for quite a while and rejected a lot of ideas. By accident I struck upon featuring the Speedlight in the photograph. I also wanted to incorporate a number of the techniques that we talk about on the pages of this book. But like everything, it all comes down to money. There was a budget. We searched a lot of models’ portfolios to fi nd the perfect subject. In the end I pressed my studio manager into service.

I wanted to imply movement. We handled this in a couple of ways: the photograph was shot on a slant so the woman’s hair hung at an angle. We used a fan to add to the illusion. A tungsten light was placed behind the model to create some blur.

Four Speedlights, in three groups, doing separate jobs: lighting her face and hair with daylight; adding the comet-like background light; emphasizing the blue color but keeping it off her face. The trick was timing when to have Leah initiate the stroboscopic Speedlight in her hand each time we made an exposure.

We used lots of gobos to keep each light from “contaminating” the others. So there was a great deal of fi ne tuning. But the whole shot was done in about twenty exposures which is a testament to the methods we have at our fi ngertips today.