I’ve been playing around a lot with FourSquare, recently. And no, I don’t mean that silly Facebook App that tells people where you are all of the time and that allows you to become the mayor of Whateverville. No, I’m talking about THE Foursquare.
The FourSquare is a combination of a custom designed flash bracket and an equally custom designed 30 inch softbox, both of which fold down to a small package. The bracket can hold up to four speedlights, which is what it did on this very sunny day. The nice thing about the FourSquare is that the back of the softbox can be opened, allowing you to trigger the flashes optically if you want to. As this shot of dancer Olympe (you know you’re destined to do great things when your parents name you like that!) was shot in blazing sunlight and optical triggering can be unreliable, I preferred to use the following setup: one SB-900 was attached to the foursquare as a Commander, and connected to my camera with the SC-28 cord. The other three Speedlights were set up as Remotes. The flash signal goes from the camera to the Commander via cable, so no problem there. And the Commander is so close to the Remotes, that the infrared signal triggers those without a problem.
An alternative would have been to equip the four SB-900′s with PocketWizards Flex TT5′s, but this setup is expensive enough as it is 
Anyway: why would you want to use this setup instead of real studio lights? One word, or actually: three words: High Speed Sync. As you notice from the exif-info, this was shot at a blazing 1/4.000 of a second at f 2.8. Try that with studio flashes! High Speed Sync allows you to work with fast shutter speeds and wide open apertures (to minimize distracting backgrounds such as this one). The only drawback is that it eats a lot of power, especially when you diffuse your light through a softbox. That’s why 4 SB-900′s were used (at full power).
More info on the FourSquare can be found here.
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Nice shot, Piet.
I’m just finishing Joe MacNally’s book, in preparation for my upcoming Venice workshop. Should be fun!
George
Hi Piet – my turn to comment on your blog!
I’m a bit confused by your last part of the article where you say that shooting at high speed sync eats a lot of power and that’s why you need 4 speedlights. I agreed that it will drain batteries fast and to get a fast recycle time on the flashes – but the exposure of the flash is controlled by the aperture and you’re using a wide open one, f2,8. So your flash output shouldn’t be all that much to get f2.8. The 1/4000th shutter speed will freeze the model and make the ambient exposure darker.
But can you explain what you meant by high speed take power? Maybe I’m missing something here.
Hi Darlene, welcome to the blog
), that proposition is only valid up until the sync speed of your flash.
Your line of reasoning is understandable: we’re always taught that aperture controls flash, and shutter speed controls ambient, but as I will also point out in my next eBook (that must be hint number 14
If you’re working in the realms of high speed sync, the following happens: at faster shutter speeds than the normal sync speed, the second curtain already starts to close while the first is still moving. So normal flash will lead to black banding (the higher your shutter speed, the more of a black band you get). High Speed Sync makes the flash pulsate stroboscopically-like, throughout the shutter movement, instead of one short burst. What you get is lots of small flash bursts in High Speed Sync. But because these happen so fast, they cannot be as powerful as normal flashes…
That’s why, at shutter speeds above sync speed, the shutter speed (indirectly) also affects the flash power…
And to compensate for that, you need more flashes… Some people, like sports photographer Dave Black, use up to 8 speedlights in one large group to have a reasonable amount of light at these higher shutter speeds…
I hope this clarifies things. If not, please let me know…