The Flash Bus with Joe McNally & David Hobby, in SLC!

This blog post will be more interesting to the photographers out there – if you are interested in The Flash Bus you really need to sign up and attend the seminar closest to your city. It has been selling out in various cities across the country and some of those people flew out to Salt Lake City to attend. And it is totally worth it.

The seminar is 10am-5pm and David Hobby teaches the first half and then Joe McNally takes the stage and gives examples of how to add lights and light modifiers to create different effects. David uses manual lighting setups and Joe tends to use TTL (Nikon specifically). I learned a ton and I learned more from their approach. We all have access to the same tools – it is how we use them that makes our photography unique.

I even won a copy of David Hobby’s DVD Lighting in Layers. David decided to give away the DVD set to the first person to show him a film camera – guess how many cameras are in my backpack. I have 3 – and one of them was a film camera. I was fast in finding it!

Joe McNally really has more lighting gear than any other photographer that I know of. I am sure someone out there has more – but Joe McNally travels with his. I took some photos of his lenses, flashes, and other gear laid out on the table. He has back up lenses, back up flashes, back up bodies, and back up computers. And I think they used them all. There were some technical difficulties but we continued through the class and it rocked.

For the record it snowed in Salt Lake City, Utah – hooray for shorts in Spring!

Lighting in Layers is very important and we learned how to David Hobby went through lighting different scenes for different portraits. His use of ambiant, key, fill, and accent lights was just logical and I think I have found a new way to approach lighting my subjects.

There were a few technical difficulties in the afternoon. As the assistants worked on fixing the problem Joe continued teaching, fielding questions, and teaching. He one quote really was an inspiration: “Risk is a component of photography – take a chance and make a leap.”

Joe’s part was much more practice – he would start with one light and work in adding more lights and different light modifiers. He would demonstrate the effects of the light and how they would change.

And I was selected to be a model! It was pretty cool staring down the barrel of a camera – and it was really cool to see the portrait be created from one light to about 4 different lights. There were gels, snoots, a strip light on a softbox and it looks so cool!

Joe then demonstrated another lighting setup – with the aid of a dancer. This who sequence was just fun to watch and the light and the shadows created are stupendous.

This last photograph is one of my favorites – it is during the questions and answer session. I just love the look of both men’s faces. It’s a showdown!