Cory here…  OK, so you know things have gotten backed up when I start writing blog posts.  Simply put, I don’t blog.  Don’t get me wrong, I have a blog… and a Facebook page, and a MySpace page, and have even built a couple dozen websites over the years, but I just don’t have the discipline to keep up with any of them   But, Samantha needs a little relief, so today I blog!

A couple of weekends ago Samantha and I took a road trip with the kiddos up to Nashville, Tennessee for a flash photography workshop held by Neil Van Niekerk.  Samantha and I can use flash just fine, but we wanted to take it to the next level and that’s where Neil can help.  He’s absolutely the on-camera flash KING in the wedding photography world if not, in my opinion, the entire photography industry.  Of course he’s also great at off-camera lighting, but that wasn’t the focus of the workshop.

Here are a few images from the workshop.  Of course, these aren’t exactly our style since it’s not a regular thing to go out and hire models to shoot with, but I think you’ll enjoy them anyway…

This is Neil giving some direction to one of the models…

And here are some of the results.  Notice the natural light on her left.  The right side is compensated by flash from my camera to even things out and bring up the contrast…

And this one is natural light from the back with flash in the front.  Notice the angle of the flash looks like it’s coming from the upper left, but it’s actually coming from my camera.

And here we start working with a bonus portion of the workshop which no one expected: video lighting!  This is a technique starting to really get some traction with photographers and our workshop was blessed with the extra treat of having world famous commercial and wedding photographer Chuck Arlund give a demomstration on how he uses it for his shoots.  The following pictures use nothing but a single, hand-held video light.  It’s fairly dark in these rooms and flash is not used in any way…

And then we moved outside to see what we could do with some off-camera lighting.  This was using two wireless flashes in the back of two softboxes.  The guy in black is Neil holding one of the softbox flashes and the guy behind him is Chuck Arlund helping out.  (That’s not me shooting.  I’m starting to get some white hairs from my kiddos, but am not losing any yet, praise God! )

And here are a few results…

This is one shot from when we were learning how to use a light meter.  Too cool…

And last we went back in for a couple more shots to practice what we had learned.  This is just one of them.  The background was very bright natural light through the window.  Without using flash I would’ve only had two options: 1. expose for the subject so you can see them which would result in the background “blowing out” or being too bright to make out any details, or 2. expose for the background and let the subject be a dark shadowed sillouette.  In this case I exposed for the background, but then lit my subject with just the right amount of flash so both the back and foreground were properly exposed.  Much better

That’s it!  I hope you enjoyed them!