This past Tuesday I attended a flash photography seminar and workshop in Denver put on my Neil van Niekerk. Neil in my opinion is the master of on-camera flash photography. He has an excellent blog covering all aspects of his technique, which I’ve been following for the past year.  It was great to get to know Neil and his assistant Karen throughout the day.

The seminar was the first half of the day and Neil lectured and did some small demonstrations of getting the most out of our on-camera flashes.  He also did an incredible job of showing how to misplace camera gear in a meeting room.  It was great to see someone else that does the same things I do and can’t remember where I placed my flash I just had in my hands 30 seconds ago. I walked away from the seminar with a preview of his upcoming book and a wealth of knowledge and I can’t wait to getting practicing.  I also came to the conclusion that my little Canon 430ex flash wasn’t going to cut it and I would need to invest some more money into a Canon 580ex II. Ugh, it seems like it is a never ending cycle to always need some new gear.

After lunch was the hands on workshop.  We started out in the lobby of the Colorado History Museum, worked our way outside, had some dinner on the 16th St Mall, took some more images on the 16th St Mall and finally ened up at Union Station.

NOTE:  All images on this posting have only had minimal processing in Lightroom (white balance, slight tone curve, color/BW) and I didn’t go round trip to Photoshop to enhance any of the images.  The image above was taken on the 16th St Mall (models: Andrea and Aaron) with my flash bounced off a nearby building.  I believe I had the flash gel’d at 1/2CTS as well.  The 1/2CTS gel was to tone down the street lamps which are not seen in this image.   The image below is an example of an extreme backlit subject and then rendered in high contrast B/W.  Flash was bounced off the ceiling behind me to help lift the light on Aaron’s face.

We also experimented with using some portable soft boxes with a single Canon 580ex II triggered by pocket wizards. In this image, Andrea is lit by a soft box to my right.  I like the vanishing point created with my wide angle in this image.

This next image has nothing to do with flash photography but I really liked the reflections of the clouds on the office windows.  I couldn’t help but to take a stock image for my collection.

At dinner, I pulled out my camera and took a few images of Niel with the group.  Neil did as well and about blinded our waiter in the process as his flash went off right in the waiter’s face.  Something to make note of to make sure that your flash isn’t going to blind someone while you are shooting.  The restaurant was very dark but lit up well with my flash.  The flash was bounced over my right shoulder up into the ceiling to create this side lighting image of Niel.

This next image is one of my favorites.  From my one on-camera flash I was able to evenly light Aaron and Andrea even though Aaron is considerably further down the alley way.  This was accomplished by bouncing the flash off the opposite wall of the alley way.  This was one of those way cool moments for me in that I was able to actually successfully create this shot with just a single flash.

Finally, the last stop of the workshop was Union Station.  This image had the flash bounced over my left should up into a glass windowed wall.  I had on a 1/2 CTS gel and you can see the chandlers still have a warm glow but not an extreme warm glow, which is what would of occurred without my flash gel’d.

Thanks Neil and Karen for putting on a great seminar and thanks Aaron and Andrea for being great models.

Author: Mark

One Response to “Neil van Niekerk Flash Photography Seminar + Workshop Experience”

1. Andrea says:

   August 19, 2008 at 12:49 pm

   Hi, Mark. Thanks for putting up some of the images of AAron and I. They look great! Always enjoyable to see some of the finished product after doing the modeling.

   Andrea