I was asked to run a lighting workshop by some members of my camera club. The remit was they are relatively new to the world of flash and studio photography so wanted to get some practical experience of working with various light set-ups and light modifiers. I was just there to facilitate with the set-ups and give some advice if advice was needed. So we had 4 hours in the studio and thanks to another member of the group we also had a model (Mhairi McGowan) and make-up artist (Charlie Doherty), which always helps when running a workshop 🙂

In order to help with the session I had spent some time searching the internet looking for some interesting studio photographs, each with a different lighting set-up. In total I selected about 10 images. I then showed these images to the group and asked them to select an image that we would then try to reverse engineer the lighting set-up in order to recreate a similar looking image. This approach was very successful and it meant we were not trying to invent anything for ourself on the day and it made the job for the model really easy as all she needed to do was to copy the pose from the selected image. As there was 10 members of the group and time was limited meaning each person could only take a few shots of each set-up; however everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and all contributed well to the session.

So now that everyone has have had a bit more exposure to the studio and tried different lighting set-ups I hope it has demystified some of the technical aspects and perhaps my simplistic approach will encourage the members to explorer the creative realms of flash photography.

To see more examples taken on the day please read on