Don’t just use your strobes to light up everything. Sometimes you need to be careful how to use your strobes to NOT light parts of the image so that you can make shadows.
I loved this sponge with the look of a cookie monster. But if I had used me strobe(s) closer to the lens for front lighting, it would have lit up the sponge inside the “mouth” and “eyes.” I wanted the mouth to be a big dark area, and the eyes black as well. That is why I have my strobe(s) on long arms so that I can move them around from front to side depending on the subject. They let me take more photos until I get the shadows just right. I kept moving my left strobe further to the side and forward so that the shadow almost filled the mouth.
I used my post editing software to make the photo a little more saturated, a tiny bit darker and added a little more contrast. This is easy to do with your vivid-pix software and really makes the photo more special.
Enjoy the journey,
Cathy Church