Utah Strobist meetup May 30th

Last weekend I attended the first Utah strobist meet up held this year. I wanted to leave a little obvious but easily forgotten tip mixed in with a recount of the event.

This is one of the rare instances where I have an excellent before and after photos to share and illustrate the tip. Meet Alexa, a young lady who showed up to model for our group. I don't want to talk to much about the lighting (my lighting is really simple and mobile) but instead I wanted to point out something about composition.

Wide angle lenses are great for getting a lot of that cool sky as a background but will make your subject look immense and out of proportion. Here is a classic example of a wide angle shot and the distortion it creates:



Here is the quick tip, have the model lean forward slightly when shot such that the distortion is counteracted. The results are much more pleasing!



Now for some really cool lighting. A friend and Mentor of mine Kim Guanzon introduced me to the beauty light. OK so I am familiar with the beauty light and have experimented with it a little but this was the first time I had real experience using the light. Here you can see Kim setting up the light:



The amazing thing about the light is the hard/soft quality of the light. How can I describe it but as being beautiful!



Here is the beauty dish on Kim's beautiful wife Laarni:



One more result from the beauty dish:



One more behind the scenes view of the light setup:



I oughta throw out the fact that Laarni is an amazing makeup artist. Here she is doing Alexa's makeup.



I did take a few natural light shots, but I was loving the beauty dish so much that I only had a few of those. Here is a natural light shot of the lovely Tamara Luke:



One more photo done with my simple strobist setup. A single light source (shoot through 45" umbrella) at near ~90 degrees camera left.



Checkout more of the photos at the strobist group flickr pool:
beatthesun flickr photos