Hey there,


well I have had my first strobist encounter. I will tell you a part of the story.


My sister and her man asked me a while agoto shoot a group-shot of all the grandchildren of their family(brother in law side, so not mine). Of course I agreed to do this. I have done a similar thing before for some of their familymembers.


So we set a date and a time. We agreed on 7pm (1900h) at wednesday the 29th of september. The next day I had a wedding so it should be a quick shoot, because I hadto prepare for the next day.That wasn't a problem. My brother was with me to "assist" (in the end I was the assist []) so it was the idea to drop him of at the farm of one of their familymembers at a quarter before 7 so he could "scout" the surroundings. At that date sun would set at half past 7, it was an amazing sunset so we were having fun.


When we arrived at the farm the farmer looked strange and he told us that the shoot wasn't at 7, but at 8! [:S] He couldn't understand either, but that was the deal...


Ouch...it was going to be an outdoor shot after sunset or an indoor shot in the barn... Anyway we went off to return an hour later. In between I had to pick up an extra 430 EX flash that we needed for the wedding the next day. When we returned it was getting very dark already so an outdoorshoot wasn't really an option anymore.


So the farmer took us inside where it looked like this:





24mm f2.8 ISO-3200 1/80sec


So you could imagine that it was dark and me and my brother looked at eachother thinking...oh *&$#%$ [:#]


The farmer showed us a big grey wall where we could take the picture. At that part there was no artificial light whatsoever, but luckily he had a small construction light.


When some of the others came, one of them(also a photographer) brought another construction light. This one was bigger and so we decided it was going to be our main light. We set up 2 flashes in both sides of the camera. And my brother took a test shot of mein the situation:





40mm f8 ISO-1600 1/60sec


The background was very reflective which was pretty annoying, but better than that we couldn't have done it. As far as weknew.Both flashes were set at manual1/2 power if I remember correctly.


The final result after some photoshopping looked like this:





40mm f8 ISO-1600 1/60sec


Anyway I like the result we got, given the circumstances. It took somewhat longer than I had planned. And the family liked the result a lot so that's a good thing.


I learned a few things this evening:


1 - I had just bought a set of colorcorrectionfilters for my flash, which turned out to be the best purchase I made lately


2 - Don't let somebody plan a shoot for you who doesn't know how difficult it can be to make such a simple looking shot


3 -I have enourmously much respect for all the strobist photographers out there. It's not easy at all! [A]


4 - I don't think I will do such a shot again anytime soon. It gives me headaches [:P] I'm more a spontaneous photographer. Not a set-up guy....


If you want to give critique or comments, be my guest [] Any tips for future surprises are also welcome.


Thanks for watching,


Jan