Notes from the Road: Questions from a Stranger

So, I took the day off work and went to the Flash Bus Tour yesterday. Interesting seminar, but mostly I enjoyed getting out of the house and routine for a bit. Quick review: Hobby was a better teacher, McNally seemed more interested in showing off how cool he was and how many shots he could nail. But damn, could he nail shots! He pulled people from the audience, lit them each in different ways in minutes and snapsnap: the results were on the wall 20 feet high immediately. He'd adjust and reshoot to solve problems, but it was such a crazy pace that it became more theater than instruction.

Anyway, I get there and the seating is wedding-style. We sit around tables with strangers and during the breaks and after lunch we make small-talk with each other. So the guy at my table and I start chit chatting a bit.

First question he asks: what kind of photographer are you? Uh, I'm not really. I'm just some guy. You're not a pro shooter? Hunh. This fact, which I hadn't really considered before was made very obvious during the course of the day where speakers were baiting the crowd with comments like: "Yeah! We are crazy photographers! We love this and we do this and that and we think about it all the time!" Big cheer from everybody else but I'm like Errr, not me, dude. In fact, I still secretly harbor my painter's prejudice that photography isn't a fine art, but more of a craft.

So what are you doing my table-mate wants to know? Well, I guess I want to communicate things to my friends and family and this is sort of a language for that. I like images and work in the field of graphics, so I guess it's not that weird. But am I a photographer? Not really.

That said, what's going on here? Well, Hobby's preso was kind of about lighting in layers. He talked about additive light and the different kinds of light typically used in shots. Although no one really said it, the whole seminar and every example was about shooting people.

So I thought I would take some snaps this morning and take it for a drive. The one above is a single light shot. I'm just standing in my living room. at 1/250th f5.6 the ambient is black and all you see is the things the flash hits.

So, to see the other side some you add a second fill light on very low power. That's below. You have to play around a bit to decide how much drama you want to trade off for visibility. I'm using a ring flash to spread out the light on camera right so it isn't so obvious. Oh, and they gave us these colored gels as a freebie at the seminar, so I put a 1/2 orange on the main light to warm things up.

So I played around there for a while and then I thought I'd try to bring some background in with a third light. I liked the thing with the corks the other day, so I used that same BBQ tray on my final flash and used it to light the venetian blinds behind me. This is also on very low power but it goes a long way.

I liked the background texture, but my friend Marie commented on the sexy blue color on those shots and that made my think I should switch the orange gel for a blue one.