Light it up.

Well the speedlight class is now been and gone.  What a brilliant time I had.  I will be honest I was a bit nervous beforehand and particularly due to my friend Laura (the lecturer) also planning to sit in on the class.  There was no set format for the class as it is a rather informal class so I started by looking at basic non-TTL triggers and optical slaves.  I then went onto wireless TTL, looking at both Nikon and Canon systems.

As I am a Nikon user I am obviously very familiar with Nikon CLS (Creative lighting system) but knowing that half the class are Canon users I spent a bit of time trying to familiarize myself with the Canon system.  The two systems are very different and trying not to be bias I feel the Nikon system is much simpler to use.  One other thing I discovered is that none of the Canon speedlights can be used as optical slaves where as the Nikon speedlights can.

The next thing was to have go.  We all got up and started of with the basic non-TTL wireless triggers. The guys picked it up very quickly.  We had a look at several different light modifiers and I also showed them what effect gels have.

I did take time during the class to mention different techniques that due to the student's own camera they could not try out.  However I did try to demonstrate as much as I could as the D300 allowed me to do most things I spoke about.  One area I covered was killing the ambient which led onto high speed sync.  I explained to them how even without a studio you can produce low-key photographs.  During the class we didn't have access to the studio.  The class room had normal florescent lighting and windows.

For this shot I used a snoot to significantly cut down the spill from the speedlight.  I used an SB-910 on the stand with a 1/4 CTO gel with CLS using the popup flash as the commander.  The camera I set at 1/3200th, F5 and ISO 200.  The final shot of the class with this setup was of Laura and I think demonstrated what can be done without a studio using the right settings.

Thanks

Simon