We all know that strobes can be very handy to light up a person, or a scene.
But often it’s forgotten that you can literally change the whole scene with a strobe.
In the first sample you see Poeka shot in natural light, as you can see there is no sky… it’s mostly white.

In the next two shots you see what happens when I add strobes.
The total look of the scene changes and the sky has MUCH more detail but most of all it becomes VERY dark and moody.

Now don’t worry… you don’t need 1000000watts of power.
In fact you can do something similar with speed lights, use the HSS (high speed sync) option and you can come a long way, if you don’t get the same effect just add another speed light for a full stop extra, that should do the trick in most situations (unless you are shooting in California mid day… than add a “few” more 😀

Also with the modern sky ports and HS system from Elinchrom it’s now possible to shoot this kind of looks without the need for insane apertures of f22 and f32, you can now actually shoot this on f1.4 if you want, this is because normally strobes are limited to the 1/125 shutter speed (x-sync) but now with the HS systems like on the Elinchrom strobes you can now break this and shoot on MUCH higher shutter speeds, your output (well not exactly, it’s the light hitting the sensor) will go down when you raise the shutter speed, but overall you will get really cool results.