Scott Diussa Photography

Photo Education Week, Salt Lake City, Utah

Friday, May 29, 2009

These were the two lighting setups for you to see. When I teach these types of classes I bring a couple of small stands, one umbrella and one soft box in my suitcase. That setup with three flashes and a fourth to control the whole thing is a great, quick portrait studio. The shot on the right was to test how the amber colored gel was working on a single flash behind the right hand part of the wall. I liked the results in the final image of Cindy above.

We tried a few other interesting wireless flash setups as well for people to experiment with. When I say “we” I mean my partner in-crime for the day, Paul Van Allen, from Nikon as well. (Paul did a great presentation on how to take better pictures of your kids playing sports... very cool.) Paul had seen something really cool on Flickr where a guy drenched a tennis ball in talcum powder and then shot it bouncing off of a hard surface. We thought it would be great to re-create that so we did... and made a huge, powdery mess at the same time! So, we will not take credit for this idea and give full credit to ITC_Photo on Flickr (who did a much better job!)

Kiwi fruit lit from underneath with a single SB-800 flash. The flash was in a plastic bin with a translucent dry erase marker board on top of it. Very simple setup and only cost about ten bucks at Office Depot!

The Photo Education Week event went very well. I had a great time with everyone there and I think there are a lot of new wireless flash users out there! I enjoyed teaching the travel class and the hands-on wireless flash workshop was a blast. Our model, Cindy, is the daughter of one of the Inkley’s sales associates as well as a very knowledgeable sales associate herself and she was a great sport with all of the people firing flashes at her. Here are a couple of my sample shots that I did along the way while showing the group how to make everything work.

Inkley’s offers portrait shoots so they had a great selection of backgrounds and this cool window setup in the room. The blue background shots were with a three light setup on groups A, B and C... an umbrella fill light, a soft box main light and a flash on the floor lighting the background. Pretty simple setup. I had a “voice activated light stand” hold the background flash above here for the hair light on the left to show what that would do. The window was just a soft box to the left and an amber-gelled flash inside the window box. Again, real simple setup and the results were great while thinking under pressure with a bunch of people standing around!

Since I was busy with the portrait shoot the whole time I didn’t get to shoot these until the day was over. So, there are some smudge marks on the back ground that I don’t like but I thought I’d share this with you anyway. The first picture is just a single off-camera SB-900 flash up and to the right. The camera is set to high-speed FP sync at about 1/2000 of a second. You get the ball covered in powder, have someone hold it above the table and then as soon as it hits fire the shutter. We didn’t need any fancy triggers for this... just a bit of practice. Then I added two SB-R200 lights with red gels to both sides and that made for an interesting set of photos as well.

What I find really funny is that we went way overboard on the powder and the ball didn’t even bounce in picture number three! It just went... THUD! That was pretty funny!

So, just a table, some black presentation board from Office Depot, a tennis ball, baby powder and a vacuum is all you need. Oh... and some ventilation in the room would help, too! We didn’t think about that before hand!

It was a fun day and a great learning experience. I don’t usually do these that much and it was very enjoyable to be out teaching photography again.

Have fun experimenting and hopefully I’ll have some more stuff to post soon...