In the trunk I found an 8′ light stand, but no umbrella or softbox. In the camera bag I had a couple of flashes and a large and mediium ExpoImaging Rouge Flashbender. While not really an ideal portrait setup, I figured I would use a flash on the stand with the large FlashBender as the key light. While this would give some decent directional light, the shadows would be pretty harsh and without another good modifier I needed a way to soften the shadows. The simple solution was to use another flash on-camera with the medium Flashbender. By throwing the light from the flash on the camera, this would help soften shadows and fill in any dark spots.

Did I pull it off with an absolute minimum of equipment, you be the judge.

First Test Shot

This wasn’t too bad but the blue wasn’t showing up as much as I wanted. Back into the gel kit I found a darker blue and tried a second test shot.

Second Test Shot

Ok! Now we are getting somewhere. I wished I had taken the white background so I would get a red, white, and blue effect but since I only had the gray, this would have to work. Time to stick a live subject in.

Live Shot

Due to the height, the colors start to mix and become more of a purple. Ideally I would have liked to have mounted the background light on the top of the backdrop stand which would have made the blue and red stand out more. Actually, if I had enough lights I would have liked to have had blue on one light, red on another, and a bare third light to try to create red, white, and blue stripes.

Although it worked really well for one or two people, the test was was it would look like with a group, it didn’t take long before a small group (we actually shot groups up to 10 people with this same setup).

Group Shoot

Not too shabby for a 1 minute gel setup. This has really inspired me to try to get even more creative with gels so stay tuned and see if I can come up with something really interesting.

This past weekend myself and fellow photographer buddy Chris Diset joined forces with Nations Photo Lab to demo off-camera lighting techniques at the Pro Photo Expo in Pasadena. Over the three days, hundreds and hundreds of people came by to see what we were doing and even to take shots with our great models.

On Friday, we started off with Monique La Barr who was a great sport the entire day and really helped draw attention to the Nations Photo Lab booth. Here are a few of my favorite shots from Friday.

On Saturday I was thrilled to have two of my daughters with me. Andi Garrison was there to do makeup while Taylor Thorne rocked the house with her modeling. In the booth next to use was Backdrop Outlet who loaned us a cool purple background for the day. Some of my favorite shots from Saturday include these:

On Sunday, Monique was back along with a different background from Backdrop Outlet.

Of course, I have to throw in a couple shots of the team. The first pic below is Chris hamming it up for the camera and the second shot are my two girls.

Want to learn more about off-camera flash and help make your images better, be sure and check out all my tutorials at http://cameradojo.com and my lighting products at http://blackbeltlighting.com.

Last week I was out in Las Vegas at WPPI doing lighting demos, then it was off to Minnesota where I hooked up with Jason Anderson where we teamed up to teach a Lightroom workshop at the Northern Light Convention.

This weekend it’s off to Hollywood for an LA Shoot This! event with a bunch of photographers and models on a double deck bus tour of great Hollywood landmarks. There are a few tickets left, be sure and check it out at:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=191226247564750

March 11th – 13th Chris Diset is joining up with me to do lighting demos at the ProPhoto Expo in Pasadena.

There are a lot of other great events coming up over the next couple of months and I really hope to meet more of you at some of these events.

Every hotel within driving distance was already booked due to hundreds of canceled flights so I had no choice but to hunker down in O’Hare for the night. The airport staff laid out seemingly child-sized cots for us around midnight.

You must be thinking “at least you had a cot for the night”. I am 6′ 2″ and there is simply no position on this thing that was even remotely comfortable. Add to that the overhead lights, even with half of them turned off, was very bright. On top of this, imagine when someone holds an inflated balloon tight and twists their hands on it making that horribly obnoxious squeaking sound…that is exactly what it sounded like anytime anyone moved on these Boy Scout Torture Tables.

The real kicker was security coming in, flipping the lights on, and telling everyone it was time to wake up. Oh I beg to differ Mr. Blue Jumpsuit with an iron-on badge…my alarm has not gone off yet, therefor it is NOT time for me to wake up. My unwillingness to snap out of unconsciousness was only meet with additional blue jumpsuited guys who were even more insistent that it was indeed time to wake up.

Oh well, my head is reeling and groggy from an apparent lack of sleep when I finally was able to focus on my phone and realized that it was 4:00am. Really? Really? Reeeeeeaaaallllly? The powers that be at O’Hare found it sufficient that putting cots out at midnight and kicking us out of them at 4am….4 hours….really?

It’s now coming up on 7am, I have about 90 minutes before my flight. The flight itself is only about 90 minutes so there won’t be a whole lot of sleeping there. Once we land, Jason Anderson from CanonBlogger is picking me up for the FOUR HOUR DRIVE to Brainard so we can do a Lightroom presentation. No doubt I will get more sleep in the back of the rental car than I got in the airport.

Over the years the travel Gods have blessed me, in all of my travels I have only had three multi-hour delays and nothing longer than an hour for the past 11 years…I guess when my number came up this time there needed to be some payback from all the good luck I have had over the years. Such is life.

If you are out there traveling, I wish you well, for me, I need some sleep.

If you are going to be at any of these events, please stop by and say hi.

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