You Light up my Life!

OK, so that was arguably the cheesiest post title I’ve ever posted, but it sums up my day for this past Sunday…or the first half of the day anyway!

Sunday was a gorgeously sunny day in Victoria and I had the pleasure of taking part in two super fun activities: a afternoon lighting course hosted by Kerrisdale Cameras Victoria and taught by Al Smith, and an evening engagement session with the lovely in every way Miss Lindsay and her wonderful fiancé Mark!

As a self-employed professional, I have the great joy of choosing which professional development courses and workshops I want to take and which skills I want to tackle next! It can be a daunting task, with so many incredible workshops to choose from across the globe hosted by a number of incredible photography industry leaders; I feel incredibly fortunate to have attended workshops in Newport Beach, Las Vegas and Vancouver in the past year alone!

When I heard Al was teaching a local off-camera flash workshop I decided to jump in and try it out; off-camera flash is something I’d like to start incorporating into my photography bit by bit (and I thank you in advance for your patience in front of my lens as I learn and experiment)!

Thank you Kerrisdale for putting on the workshop, thank you Al for demystifying off-camera flash systems for me, and thank you also to our model Leanne for joining us for the day (and enduring the chilly tunnel as we set up our lighting systems)! Brave girl!

Here are some of my images from the fun we had at the workshop! As you can see from this first image below, we backlit Leanne with a flash that had a blue gel to give her that blue rim light around her hair and the edges of her sweater!

Fellow photographer, and friend, Jesse Holland shares some of her images with Leanne (hidden just behind Jesse), Caitlin, and Chris.
Al got his turn in front of the lens too; Jesse has the “official image” for this shot riiiiight here—I just wanted to show the lighting set-up!Once we had experimented with the blue gel, we added in another flash with a red gel to give some differentiation in the background!Al getting his serious instructional face on!For the next series of images, we shot with a bit of a different set-up. As you can see in the image below, we had three flashes on a rig together, which we took turns positioning around our model while everyone got a chance to learn and shoot!Jesse, you are absolutely adorable! I have no idea how you can balance so well with this photographer stance, but you work it out just fine!Things got a little silly at this point, with Al taking a turn to play with dandelions…while suited up with bluebells and daisies to boot! The following images were taken without flash.Again, Jesse has the official images of Al’s dandelion escapades, which she and Al are scrolling through below.Thanks again to everyone who brought this workshop together; it was a great learning opportunity!