For a creative art like wedding photography I believe its essential to update your training and gain new experiences outside of shooting actual weddings so that you can develop your skills and grow as photographer so as part of my own ongoing development yesterday I had the great pleasure of attending a training course by Damien Lovegrove, a wedding photographer whose work I have always admired.
After 10 years of shooting weddings Damien has now moved on to focusing on training other photographers and runs workshops for various different specialties and the course I attended yesterday was called Speedlight Mastery and focused on off camera flash using thew new Pocket Wizard TTL system.
It was a fantastic course and with a small class size of just 4 it was great to have plenty of time to shoot Katie, our lovely model for the day and lots of time to chat with Damien and the other attendees. Here’s a few images from the course that were shot around Bristol city centre, all images straight from camera with no post processing, just re-sized for our blog.
by Nick
8 comments
Nick - Very well thanks, the Pocket wizards are great little devices.
Galen - How well did the TTL function work out for you?
Wedding Cars Hamilton - Good photography here you try to publish very different things it’s help to identify your abilities well.
Oleg Bari - Lovely done !!! Great light !!! #7 and # 2 are amazing !
Nick - Hi Michael, we shot a few scenes with a mini softbox but for a lot of the day we just used bare flash or bare flash with gels to add some colour and show how the light was falling. We shot a lot of different locations and poses through the day and ultimate image quality was never the main concern (otherwise we would have used bigger soft boxes and I would spent time editing) it was all getting the techniques across using the Pocket Wizard TTL Systems which I think the course did very well. Considering there was 5 of us shooting the same speedlights with 4 different camera models and with shutter speeds ranging from 1/20 to 1/4000 of a second I was well impressed with how the PW’s coped.
Brian Hull - Great shots. I love the theatrical look to them.
Hilton Head Photographer Kellie McCann - Love your train and track shots! I use Radio Poppers…they work pretty well, except if you get the deadly E2 error, which is basically fatal
But frequency is not an issue, so maybe Michael Zelbel should check them out!
Happy Shooting!
Beauty Photography Michael Zelbel - Awesome results! The photos are great. One more prof that it does not need big strobes to make good photos.
I really like the ETTL. But I’m not so happy with the pocketwizards. I still have the American models which frequency wise interfere with the radio noise emitted by the Canon EX flashes. It makes them completely unreliable.
The scenes at the bar and the sofa for me are a bit to hot in her face. Like to small light modifiers.
I’m curious, what modifiers does Damien use in general?
I wish you good light!
– Michael