Lost In Kaneohe: Easter Lighting & Pot Luck Meet

For Easter this year I spent most of the day at the Waahila Ridge State Recreational Area with the HPF/808 Photogs for a Lighting & Pot Luck Meet. Thanks to Nikki we even had a few models for the afternoon. It was a pretty big meet and the weather was fairly nice...except for the light showers we had later in the afternoon. But it was still nice to spend time with other photographers talking about gear and eating good food.

I decided to break this blog entry into several parts because I took a lot of pictures that day (and because it's an easy way for me to keep up with this blogging thing). This set of pictures was taken earlier in the day when we were talking, eating and waiting for the models to arrive.

Since it was a lighting meet I brought my strobist gear with me. Tashi, Janet's puppy, was there so I thought I'd practice with her as my model. I set up a Manfrotto Nano lightstand, 580EX II Speedlite, Lastolite Ezybox Speed-Lite, CyberSync wireless triggers and took a few portrait type shots of Tashi. In the first shot she was lying down under a covered area that had some daylight coming from in front and behind her while she was lying in the shadow. I tried to balance the flash with the natural light and thought this shot came out pretty nicely.

In this second shot she came out from the covered area and was lying down facing towards the shadows. I placed my light a few feet in front of her to light her face up a bit and it seemed to help prevent her face being all in shadow.

I didn't use my strobist gear much more during the meet, but I did have fun using it with Tashi. For the rest of the meet I took a lot of candids and behind the scenes shots as the others were shooting the models. I'm not comfortable working with models yet...but I think I'd eventually like to get into it a little more for the experience.

Here are a few candid shots from the meet...