Following on from my previous post on the strobist phenomenon, over the weekend we held a meetup of the Melbourne Strobist group. We hosted 19 photographers in a large hall with 5 sets running concurrently and 6 models on hand.
It’s a great way to drive your experience forward when it comes to using off camera lighting. Usually I’ll use my speedlights, but one of the the guys in my group brought along 3 studio monoblocks, which was an interesting change. Over the course of the afternoon I learned that:
- When you change the power settings you need to phyisically dump the power from a monoblock, otherwise the next shot will be over or underexposed. This is not a big issue but can throw your light metering and adjustments into chaos if you forget
- Monoblocks give more power and having a modelling light can be useful. But speedlights are much easier to move around on their stands.
- My cheap radio triggers can still be used to trigger a large strobe, but you need the right cords. We ran two on radio triggers and one on optical slave
- Optical slaves are great unless you have 5 studio setups going at once, then every time someone else takes a picture, your strobe goes off…
- I have very little gear compared to some people there, one of the guys in particular is a regular “MacGuyver” – he has so much gear and a large amount of it is very high quality home constructed stuff. I’m extremely jealous…
It was great to watch the way that some of the guys give direction to their subjects. Very subtle and respectful, they coaxed great results from the models in a way that I am just learning.
All up – a good day, great company and some useful experience.
A big thanks to all those who helped out and of course to our wonderful models.
Great writeup Shane!
We had an optical slaved flash too, and it just went off like nobody’s business and you could hear it beeping each time it triggered (it was one of the 2 flashes mounted high above the model on a boom).
Don’t worry, we are all forever learning (one thing or another). Great thing about the group environment is that we can all learn off each other and hopefully help each other to grow.
Thanks Will, You are right – it’s a journey.
And congratulations on being the first real person (not spam bots) to comment in my blog.
I feel my life is validated at last! ;-P