A very busy and wet few days here in Taipei. Last Sunday saw the first Light Your World workshop take place at Taipei Artist Village and the Huashan Culture Park. Before we get to that however, the date and location for the third Taipei Photowalk has been decided. Like the last one, this is just an informal get together that’s open to all. No advance booking or anything required. It’ll be held on Sunday October 18th from 3:30pm. The meeting place is Xin Beitou MRT station, from where we have a range of subjects to shoot.

Jaclynn modeling for Light Your World

On to Light Your World. Firstly, thanks to all the participants. It was a fun day of shooting and learning, and a pleasure to be able to give you some little bits of advice. A very special thank you to the beautiful Jaclynn who braved the wet and windy weather to come out and model for the class. If anyone is looking for a model, I can highly recommend her. Professional, friendly and talented, Jaclynn is a joy to work with.

The day started off with a minor delay, as the manager of the room I’d booked for the morning had forgotten to tell the security guards that we’d booked it. A quick explanation and phone call later however, we were in business. We had 13 participants in all which was a good number. The morning session involved theory and concepts used in lighting. We covered remote triggers, various lighting modifiers – umbrellas, soft boxes, reflectors, grid spots, snoots and gels, as well as looked at the role of aperture and shutter speed, light fall off (the dreaded inverse square law) and so forth. It actually ran a bit longer than I’d intended but no one seemed to be too bored so I guess it must have been okay.

Following a pizza lunch at the new Alley Cats, we grabbed an undercover section of the Huashan Culture Park and set to work shooting. With the exception of a few shots to test the lights, and some crowd shots, I didn’t really shoot much at all – probably no more than 10 frames all day. Instead, I tried to take a hands off type approach in order to let the participants maximize their time behind the lens. By giving them some starting numbers, coupled with the morning’s information handout and discussion, I wanted to help them learn by doing, rather than simply watching me shoot. Hopefully it worked out okay.

Light Your world - Model and Participants

After an hour or so of practicing on each other using a one light bounce umbrella, shoot through umbrella, softbox and some on-camera bounced flash, it was time to photograph someone better looking. Using a mixture of softbox lighting and a shoot thru umbrella (thanks Todd) everyone got a couple of hours to photograph Jaclynn and try a number of different poses, settings, outfits and backgrounds. Based on the images I’ve seen so far, everyone got a decent number of keepers from the day, with a few of the photos being superb.

For those of you who missed out and are interested, I’m presently putting the final details together for a repeat workshop for sometime in November. More information coming soon. For now though, I’ll leave you with another of the test shots I took.

Jaclynn modeling for Light Your World