Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Two Minute Lighting Workshop #2


In the not to distant past, I taught what is my favorite workshop to teach, "Masters Of Light". I won’t make some cheap pitch here for the workshop, but here is the url to my workshops in case your interested… www.texasphotoworkshops.com. I wanted to teach my students how to think wildly out of the box. My neighbor is Willie Nelson’s Golf Pro and he looks like he could be wild, but in fact he is gentle as they come. Well, unless you really piss him off and from what I’ve seen that is pretty hard to do. Anyway, I recruited Jeff to be our “Bad Ass Harley Model”. However, rather than shoot the typical location static portrait, I wanted my students to learn how to shoot action portraits using remote lighting. First I demonstrated the shoot with my Nikon D2X (yes, I’m a bit behind on updating my equipment. It’s called having too many children in college at the same time:). I also used the Nikon SB800’s. I mounted my camera on the back gate of my SUV using a Bogan majic arm. The Nikon master SB800 was attached to my camera's hot shoe, but the flash itself was in the off mode. I also attached another SB800 to the frame of the Harley using a Bogan Super Clamp. I've also connected the camera to my computer so I could control everything remotely from the front seat. I’ve left the flash in the shot so everyone can see its placement. For publication, I've photoshoped it out. From here, we took off and cruised 6th street in Austin, Texas. Jeff followed with his cig hanging from his lips. Oh yes, I also dragged the shutter for one second. Dragging means to set the flash to trigger at the end of the shutter setting and in this case it was one second. My aperture was around F 8 and the iso was set at 100. My zoom was set at 24mm. As we cruised, sometimes we would hit small bumps and the camera would bounce a little, adding to the unique wild look of the photo. Now that’s how you shoot a “wow” portrait. Again, this is my favorite class to teach.