R.E.A.L Workshop ~ Demystifying Wireless Flash ~ Experience The Art

About a month ago I was asked by the R.E.A.L Workshops group to co-host and teach at their wireless flash workshop.  I am quite honored to have been asked to do this and really enjoyed teaching and hanging out with some crazy talented people this past Wednesday. Here are a few of my favorite shots that I created during the Demo portion of my presentation.  Please visit http://loveshootingagain.com/real/workshops  if you are interested in a local (Philadelphia area) community style group!  There are plenty of Workshops coming up in all sorts of areas of our business!!

A special thanks to all our “models” Who are all REAL people just letting us practice and become better photographers…  This type of exercise  is so important to help push our technical and creative boundaries… I hope you enjoy the pics and check out this Work Shop series.  Thanks!!

The first two shots from the demo are to illustrate over powering the sun to knock down the sky and get that nice texture and color while still having a properly exposed subject…  The sun is directly behind them and this picture would be a silhouette without artificial light.
I used an Alien Bee 1600 with a 5ft Octa-Box on a Boom as my “Main” Light to Camera right, as well as an Alien Bee 800 on Camera Left with a Grid to fill in the left side of the couple but still retain contrast.  The First image’s Exposure was iso 200 f/10 at 1/640th  using a Pocket Wizard Flex 5 with hyper sync.
The Second Image I switched to a standard Pocket Wizard Plus II and exposed the image at f/16 at 1/250th to keep the same overall exposure of the sky however I had to bump up the flash power about a stop to compensate for the aperture change…

The next image was taken to demonstrate using the sun as a main source of light and using artificial light to fill and accent.  For this image the sun is coming in on camera left, there is an Alien Bee with 5ft Octa-Box just left of camera to add fill to the front of our model. In addition I added an AB800 camera right and back to light her hair with a grid spot on the light, as well as an SB900 in front of the model tucked behind that rock to open up the light near her legs and her dress.  Mixing studio strobes and SB type flashes is a great way to sculpt your subject!
I wanted to show how powerful the Hyper Sync technology is.   The exposure here is f4 at 1/2000th iso 200 and being able to shoot at f4 instead of f/11 and 1/250th I was able to retain a lot more of that shallow depth of field that is so important in this type of a photograph….

This image was made at twilight to show how to balance less sky light. I used an SB900 with a Gary Fong dome as the main source of light on camera right in manual and another bare bulb SB900 with a magenta gel to add some color and separation from the background. Exposure – f/1.6 at 1/30th second iso 200.  The next two images were created just before sunset…  there was still a good amount of light but the sun was falling fast and creating a beautiful color and texture in the sky. This was lit with an SB900 with a Grid spot from Honlphoto.  Exposure f3.5 at 1/800th iso 200.  This photograph takes advantage of high speed sync via the Pocket Wizard Flex 5 system and the AC3 controller unit to individually control the power of each light.
I added another SB900 bare bulb in the background behind her legs to add separation… Grid Spots significantly narrow the beam of light coming out of the strobe allowing you to control what is getting hit by the light.  These last two images were made to illustrate that golden 5 minutes you have between sunset and darkness…  Twilight shots are some of my favorite pictures to make but you have to work fast!  These images were made using an SB900 with a Gary Fong dome as the main light in Manual using the Flex5 System again, as well as another SB900 with a magenta Gel with a grid spot on it to light her from behind giving that pink glow around her.  Exposure f/2.8 at 1/25th iso 640.  I used a slower shutter speed to allow the lights and sky in the background to show and balanced the flash power accordingly using the AC3 attachment for the Pocket Wizard Flex TT5 system.  It was too dark to see about 3 minutes after this picture was made…

I hope you enjoyed the results from this Workshop! Thanks!