I’ve finally had a chance to go through some of the images from the workshop I took a little over a week ago. As I’d said in the earlier post, the purpose of the workshop was to help photographers learn how to better use their flashes off camera. During this particular workshop, the instructor set up most of our shots with a model and a light in a few locations, guiding us toward using the correct settings for our vision and encouraging us to help the models pose. Our models were great, it can’t be easy to have 15 photographers looking you through their lenses!

The last two images were during the late-night hour when we were divided into groups of 4-5 to create scenarios and lighting set ups on our own. Modeling are Amy and Nathan, fellow photographers from Louisiana and Colorado. The first image was set up by Nathan, who had the idea to shoot through the glass block windows behind Amy, but the resulting shot was a group effort (Paul, from Tennessee, held a semi-closed umbrella in front of Amy to reflect the light back onto her face). The very last image here I did set up – I shot with the flash camera right, the light coming through the fencing.

Even though we were rained and lightninged and thundered on and it was about eight billion degrees outside that day, the workshop was a great experience. I learned a lot more about using light off camera and I’m excited to put it to use! Not only was it great to learn from Zack Arias (I’ve been watching the critiquing videos on his blog for a while – it can be hard for photographers to get no-nonsense, no-sunshine-and-rainbows responses to their work, so I appreciate his honesty and lack of pretense), but we were also using Jeremy Cowart’s studio. If you’re not a photographer you may not know his name, but I guarantee you will recognize a lot of his subjects. So cool!