Recently I attended a traveling presentation called The Flashbus consisting of Dave Hobby of Strobist fame and Joe McNally of National Geographic fame, two of the foremost users and educators of small off-camera flash units (often called “strobes.”)
These two guys got the idea to travel the country, stopping in 29 cities in 6 weeks, and teach about small flashes from their two different, yet sometimes merging, philosophies on how to use these small lights with our cameras to create immensely powerful, stunning, and beautiful images. I was lucky enough to get the approval and support of my wife to attend the stopover in Albuquerque and boy am I glad I went.
As a quick, very quick, overview/review I can say that the event was high energy, fun, informative, enjoyable, and absolutely worth the $100 to attend. In fact, I felt I had received my money’s worth in the morning watching Dave Hobby teach how to create a scene through layering light. Such was the power of Dave’s approach, explanation, and examples that Joe McNally’s live demonstration of how he thinks through lighting a scene or portrait was icing one the cake. Dave Hobby (the strobist) taught us how to layer light into a scene and control all the lights manually while Joe McNally showed us how and when to trust the camera and flashes iTTL technology (and when not to!)
The most important piece of information I received from this workshop was from Dave in how to think through lighting a scene, especially a portrait. Thinking in terms of Ambient light, Fill light, Key light (main light), and Accent light, Dave created a paradigm in my brain regarding how to think through a shoot and build the image I would like to create. The image above is one I created several years ago of my niece and my son on a beach in Mexico at sunset. I had read about and seen numerous variations on this type of lighting and thought I had it figured out. Boy was I wrong. This shot was just lucky-a big hail Mary toss. Most of the others that evening look as if the subjects, those poor kids and others, were hit with nuclear radiation. Now, thanks to Dave and Joe, I have a better understanding of what I got right in this shot, and what I did wrong in others, and thereby took away some of the mystique of lighting a scene with multiple lights.
More importantly I now have faith that I can figure out how to light a scene. Before, I thought I might be able to do it but often got stuck. In essence, I didn’t know what I didn’t know and that made me nervous. Now I feel I have a foundation, I know I know some stuff, and I know lots of what I don’t know. I’ll figure a lot out through practice and I can’t wait to get going.
So a big thank you to Dave and Joe and all the folks involved in making The Flashbus happen. It was a great time and I am so glad I took advantage of this rare opportunity. Stay tuned for some more flash induced photographs!!