Fun With Lights…..

In Santa Fe, and started my location photography and lighting workshop. It’s a good class, and we pretty much take a whole bunch of lights and rock and roll for the week. Huge thanks both to Nikon and Bogen for supporting the workshop in the way that they do. I bring down a whole bunch of SB-800 units, Justin clamps and the like, and then in the studio we have more Ranger units, light shaping tools and grip stuff than your average big city rental shop.

As you can see, we are very, very serious. The three dudes in the picture are great guys. Evan Parker on the left represents Bogen and is a tremendous resource to lots of photogs for lighting and grip solutions. On the right is Nick Rapaz, who runs the studio and is heading to NY this summer to assist Platon, who’s an amazing shooter with an incredibly definitive style of portraiture (also teaches at the workshop, a kick ass class). And Sakas is in the middle, who is also heading for New York, where eventually he’ll become a ward of the state.

Seriously… da guys… da guys are great, hard working, knowledgeable, and real go-to resources for the whole class. They are all destined for great things, if they can just stay out of jail.

So you can see the way I conduct the class is real, real boring. Today I’ll give them a pop quiz on their homework assignment of last night, which was to thoroughly read and review my white paper on file allocation tables. The quiz will be easy, though, and consist of only one question. “What the fuck is a file allocation table?”

I’ll also surprise the participants with my lecture on the historical significance of the wet collodion print process, during which I’ll examine this forgotten process and illuminate the very good reasons it in fact was forgotten. Sort of OT, but hey, I figure it’s just value added.

By the way, “da guys” were shot with a Nikon D3 and a 24-70mm lens, and lit up with the venerable Elinchrom Octa, the big fella, almost directly over the lens and about 3′ or so from their, uh, faces. Key to the deal is the 4×8 piece of white foam core just out of frame about chest height, dishing some fill. Thing is, the fill board was too quiet for these boisterous lads, especially Evan, who is going Mike Tyson on Sakas’ ear, so I whipped out (“Eeeeek! Won’t somebody help that poor man?!”) an SB-800 and slammed it into SU4 mode (manual trigger eye), programmed it to ¼ power and popped that off the board. Shot 3 frames just to make sure the lunacy was forever captured, and negotiations begin today to keep the images out of my stock files. I mean, these fellas are eventually going to be president of something, and this is just plain and simple embarrassing. More tk.

Mentioned in this post:
– Nikon SB-800
– Justin Clamp
– Nikon D3
– Nikkor 24-70mm
– Elinchrom 74-Inch Octa Bank
– Foam Board