Flashbus in Nashville

Rebecca and I are both approaching our busy time of year. This past weekend was a sample of several more to come. On Thursday we drove to Starkville for an engagement session, then another on Friday. On Saturday we shot a wedding before we headed back to Birmingham. Its great having clients in Starkville which allows us to travel to our old home and see all our MSU friends.

On Sunday we had the opportunity to drive to Nashville for a one day seminar called the FlashBus Tour featuring Joe McNally and David Hobby as the speakers. Rebecca, Caroline (Rebecca's Samford boss), and myself made the trip. As the name implies the seminar was all about small flash. Lighting is probably the hardest aspect of photography to me. Its easy to take a nice picture outside, but to be able to light up someone nicely indoors or in low light in an interesting manner, takes some skill. Rebecca and Caroline are way ahead of me on skill level, so I mainly went to be able to have a basic understanding of what Rebecca is trying to accomplish when I help her on shoots. As many of the volunteers had these as name tags, I am the VAL - "Voice Activated Lightstand."

We had a great time and I learned a lot. Both speakers are well respected in the photography world and they were both great speakers which kept it interesting. Lots of great simple tips on lighting to make a picture so much more interesting.

On a side note, I've always visioned photographers as "artsy" people, well the bunch at this stop on the tour was more like a Star Trek convention with cameras. Lots of dry humor comments from the audience and technical lingo on camera workings. We saw several clever t-shirts like: "Do you mind if I shoot you?" or "Ask me to flash you." I would be willing to bet I was the only Agronomist there.

Who are the nerds taking pictures with the bus?

We took these pictures with no flash, ignoring everything we just learned from the day