Speedlite Mastery

(This week I assisted Damien Lovegrove on a Speedlite Mastery Day.  This is my summing up.)

‘F*** f*** f***, look at that! I took that!  Kill me now, I never thought I‘d take a shot like that.’

If you’re on a workshop with Damien Lovegrove, and you’re not a mollusc, you’ll be thinking this about twenty times a day, as a conservative estimate.

On the surface of it, it’s not that hard - learn the formulae, set up the place, the model and the lights, and away you go. But if it really were that simple, we would all be huge successes.

This man is where he is because of more than just formulae. Spending a day with Damien, it is impossible not to feel the palpable joy of the chase, the buzz of capturing something wonderful, something that thousands will be happy to gaze upon. And this is after he has done it thousands of times before. It is like a drug with no comedown. He just keeps on going, filling your mind with possibilities, potential scenarios, positive propositions. Every serious photographer should aim to spend time with him. Even during breaks, he is so busy giving away every idea he has, he doesn’t manage to eat more than half his lunch, and his cappuccino has gone cold. And in the fleeting moments when he is not espousing knowledge to his immediate entourage, between mouthfuls of food he is tweeting the rest of the worldwide photo community snippets of Lovegrove wisdom on his iPad. If I had to use one word to describe my impression of him, it would be‘Unstoppable’.

Book with Damien now for a very rewarding experience, and enough inspiration to last you a very long time.

Vicky and James

I shot a wedding recently with my able colleague Ken and we decided to stay late to make the most of the beautiful grounds of the Bowden Hall Hotel in Gloucester and try a 'twilight' shot of the bride and groom, Vicky and James.

Using Ken as my 'couple', I set up two 580EXll's on stands with brollies, one ten feet to the right and one to the left and slightly behind him.  I used the ST-E2 trigger and played with the ratio control until I got something I liked, roughly 2:1 in favour of the right-hand strobe.  Keeping the shutter speed on 200th sec (manual) I then played with the aperture until I got the background 'twilighty' enough.  The ST-E2 ably adjusted the flashes to illuminate the subject as I went along.

When I was happy with the look of the light, we rushed off to find the happy couple and plonked them into the shot, and fired away.  This meant they got a great picture with minimal hanging around, so they could go straight back to partying.