A man and his bike

On Thursday night in my Lighting on Location class, Herman was kind enough to agree to be subjected to our lenses. He rode in on his electric blue Ninja, and away we went. We lit Herman up with a speed light mounted in the Westcott Apollo 28"  softbox and balanced some ambient while we still had it.

As it was 7:30, the light was dropping fast, so we wound up with shot's like these after the sun set:

 And then we moved Herman and his bike into the elevator. Yep, an elevator...

This last 1 is my favorite of the night. I love the aggressive feel of it, and the hint of blue, with the brake lights glowing red in the background.

For my engagement class, I need a couple for Monday night. If you know of anyone, let me know.

On Wednesday for the wedding class, I will be lecturing on how to set up your equipment and make it work for you.

I also need models for Thursday night's class.

Testing lights

Hey there everyone!

As most of you know by now, I was at Jerry Ghionis' seminar on Tuesday, and he taught this old dog some new tricks. As my class was shooting models on Thursday night, I was playing around with some tips that Jerry shared with us. As a wedding/event photographer, quite often I don't have the ability of using off camera flash. Due to moving around, drunk people, space, often times it's just not safe or reasonable to set a light on a stand. This first image of Matthew was taken using Jerry's helpful tip of just bouncing your "on camera" off a wall at 90 degrees from your subject, vs using a ceiling or a piece of tupperware. So of course I had to try it. And then I needed to test it at it's limits. You see, Matthew is standing on a sidewalk, and I bounced the light off a storefront 50 feet across the street. And it worked! My settings were ISO 1250, f/2.8, 1/50 sec, shot with my 5DMKII, 70-200 f/2.8IS, and the original 580EX.

Here is another shot using the same set-up with similar settings. Again, this isn't about the quality of the posing, this is about testing out a new technique.

I also worked with Virginia last night, again playing with some ideas I had. She was lit with a rechargable flash light I got at Home Depot for $20 similar to this...

For the next 2 shots, I added the 580EX hand held by Virginia's husband to add a little seperation. These were shot with a tungsten white balance also. Just going for something a little different, and to show that class that you don't need a bunch of lighting gear to get creative.

There will be a tutorial coming soon on Faded & Blurred soon about the technique used on the first image here.

Lighting on Location

IMG_4141-EditPSweb
Originally uploaded by fwisneski

Hey everyone!

My lighting on location class kicks off tonight! It's been what seems like forever since we've had this class. The picture you see above of Sondra was done in this class the last time through.

It's a really easy set up, shot with my Canon 5DMKII, the 17-40 f/4L, and the Canon STE-2 was used to trigger my 580 EX flash.

I got the great sky behind her by dialing down the exposure compensation in camera 2/3rds of a stop.

Add a set of these, and you have a whole studio set-up in your trunk:

We will be doing things very similar to this in class, so come on down!