Frankfurt
I spent most of the weekend in Frankfurt, Germany. A group of (more or less) local photographers was keen on getting together to experiment with flashes. Because many of them are only at the beginning of their blitz-career they hired me to help them out a little.
I’ve been making fun about the overorganising German way but I have to admit that it’s really fantastic to be part of such a well organised event. Some people really worked hard en long to make this day a succes. Everything was covered: location, music, nametags, catering, payments, models, gear, hotels, model releases, … Great job!
My role was to structure the day a bit and help out with the lighting without giving a seminar. The main goal was to give each photographer a lot of shooting time. I decide to give some assignments that had to be taken care of by 4 groups of 3 people. I tried to give some pointers when explaining the assignment but it was up to the group to agree on an approach. I then went from group to group to give some advice, tips, …
Even before David came up with the challenge to make an original groupshot at every strobist meeting, I was going to have a groupshot assignment. We had to make it happen really quickly so we tried to do it down and dirty.
The only nice backgroud for such a large group was the dark wooden floor, so we had everybody lay down. To get Patrick’s 1Ds mkII with the 15mm fisheye above us we had to construct a boom stand out of a tripod, a ladder, 6 bottles of water and a few kilometers of gaffer tape.
For this image we used nothing less than 20 flashes (at 1:16 power). The flashes were triggered with those brandnew wireless BioWizards. This is actually just another way to say that everyone just pressed the testbutton on his flash. We could easily pull that of with a shutterspeed of 1 second.
Thanks guys for this great event, fantastic organisation, great chats, good fun, appelcider, …
More pictures, setups and info, can be found in the Frankfurt Strobist Flickr Group.
Bert, you rock! Thanks a lot for joining us in Frankfurt – we’ll keep in touch!
Hey Bert,
thanks for being there. It’s quite a blast.
cu,
Mariano
The pleasure was all mine guys. I really enjoyed it.
Biowizards? Do you have a link to their site?
biowizards!! hahaha! i gotta get me in some of that action!
fantastic group shot, bert.
biowizards… good one… hahaha
Very nice. Especially for being “quick and dirty”.
[...] I just got back from a refreshing ski trip. You’ll have to wait a little to see some pictures but in the mean time I proudly present you a movie about the flashy meetup in Frankfurt. [...]
I’ve never heard of a BioWizard flash trigger. Where can I grab some info on them?
Yes, of course I’m joking.
biowizards rock!
[...] while ago, I wrote about ‘biowizards’, as a dirt cheap alternative for Pocketwizards to trigger a flash wirelessly. I didn’t think it was practically possible [...]
What a great idea – loving this blog, Bert!!
Dave