JoeMcnally’s Hot Shoe Diaries Workshop

Warning, more images to come 🙂

As a continuation from my previous blog post, after a heavy buffet lunch at Shangri-La (believe me, the food there was so good that it was so difficult not to want to try everything!), we all proceeded with our own individual assignments. Individual means that we split up into various groups and each group consisted of 4 team members. Each team would have a model assigned to them and we had to split our time to photograph the model.

Both Shen and Hafiz were in my group and I was the 3rd person to have a go. Part of our assignment was that we were able to borrow any of the equipment available there. From the image below, you would know that we took an Ezybox softbox with an SB-900 and an external battery pack together with another SB-900. We also made used of our own equipment as well. Since we only had an hour, we had to decide on our location as soon as we could. We had the beautiful Melissa first.

Here was Shen attempting his shot with us helping out by carrying the C-Stand

This was my attempt within 10 minutes. Wished I had more time to get the lighting set up a little bit more elaborately 😉

After the hour was up, we moved back into the workshop room where we were assigned another model to work with and we again had the usual 15 minutes. Our next model was Shirlyn who was a professional dancer (you can guess that Joe really likes dancers especially if you have read through both “The Moment it Clicks” and “The Hot Shoe Diaries”).

My first attempt to begin with one light first before adding in additional lights. The first idea that came into my mind was to try out a multiple exposure shot but with movement but after consulting Joe, that setup would have taken me more than 15 minutes of my allotted time. I then decided that I would stick with the simple double exposure and the results are shown below.

Double exposure, courtesy of a Nikon technology 😉

Since I managed to set things up pretty quickly, we then experimented with a few other shots with a simple two lighting system. Again still sticking to small flashes.

After the assignments were over, we gathered downstairs for Joe to show us a little bit more of his concept and his ideas and how he actually came up with the shot.

Joe took out the big gun for this, the 200mm f/2 lens which is a huge lens and cost a bomb!

After the workshop ended and Joe had to rush over to Business.FM for a radio interview, we quickly had our books signed as well as took photos with Joe.

Not forgetting Drew as well 🙂

Ok, I definitely need to lose lots of weight. Totally put on too much recently.

After the workshop, I had to stay back a while for a secret performance practice which was due to be showcased the day after at Joe’s Seminar. This portion was for Louis’ talk on guerrilla lighting. Whilst waiting for Joe to get back from his interview, Ian was toying around playing with his Alien Bees and while he was still setting up his lights, I took this shot of Melissa using available light.

After a brief and expensive juice at the cafe, practice started and I somehow managed to spy this guy in the ballroom taking shots of the practice using an unmarked camera. Some say that it could be a Sony Alpha but others might say that its actually a new Canon. I don’t think it was a Nikon because of shape of it but before I start to speculate, we can’t really really tell what camera is that.

An unknown person with a Sony Alpha 5D Mk2

And of course Johan was assisting out the whole day that after almost 16 hours of carrying light stands and small flashes, it seems that he has really gone bonkers 😉

This was how I spent my birthday this year with those crazy photographers as well as the honour and pleasure of meeting Joe and Drew as well as learning from him. I must practice what I learned so do drop me an email if you are interested in having your personal portraiture done.