Nikonian Lighting Workshop

I always love visiting San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area. I was actually born and raised in California, Southern CA to be exact. I've spent a lot of time in the Bay Area, it is always a treat to visit.

I conducted a Nikonian Lighting Workshop there recently, a Nikonian workshop is very similar to a SSBR workshop. The workshop is designed for just Nikon users, hence the name Nikonians. In these workshops we use the Nikon CLS method to fire our strobes remotely, rather than Pocket Wizards. On the second day of the workshop, we had a wonderful model to photography by the name Sujan. She came to us via Model Mayhem.

The workshop was held at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Union City, just south of Oakland. This photograph of Sujan was made in one of the large conference rooms located on the hotel property. I used two Nikon SB-800's for this shot. The key light was a 43" Westcott umbrella used in the shoot through position. The second light was placed in the rear of the room and shot through a decorative wood lattice which created a nice pattern on the back wall of the room.

I photographed Sujan using my 80-200 f/2.8, lens was set to about 140mm and the aperture was f/2.8. I set my ISO to 800 and my shutter speed was 1/100. I was collecting a bit of ambient coming through a set of windows at the right side of the room. In the photo below you can see the set up.

You can see that a reflector was used in front and below the model just below the frame, in order to bounce light back into Sujan to open the shadows as well as provide an extra catch light in her eyes. I the photo below you can see the background light, which I might add, had a full CTO over the flash head to add warmth.

If your interested in learning more about using your shoe mounted strobes off camera, and creating studio quality light on location, join me at a workshop. I have several venues coming up you might be interested in. I'll be in Maine at the Maine Media Workshops teaching a week long location lighting workshop in September. Maine is a wonderful location and there still are a few spaces available. For more information about that workshop, visit the Maine Media Workshops website.