REVIEW: Joe McNally & David Hobby’s Flash Bus Take Seattle By Storm

Joe McNally (left) & David Hobby (right) kick off their tour in Seattle
Copyright © Ron Martinsen – All Rights Reserved

I was a lucky enough today to attend Joe McNally & David Hobby (of Strobist.com fame)’s Flash Bus Tour that kicked off in Seattle, Washington. It was a packed house of photography geeks eager to learn from these two flash masters.

It was a full house (more than I expected actually)
Copyright © Ron Martinsen – All Rights Reserved

David Hobby’s Morning Presentation

The morning started off with David Hobby of Strobist.com showing some of his techniques in a visual presentation. During this discussion David shows how he starts off taking shots to get the ambient light where he wants it, and then how he builds up from there to do his fill light, accent light and then lastly his key light. It was very fun to have David walk through his thought process and light configurations to show how he goes about getting his results.

Shot of the projector of one of David Hobby’s Setups

I thought it was great that David not only went into detail about what went right, but also the trial and error he goes through about what goes wrong as he tries to build the ideal light setup. David’s explanations were very thorough and showed the lighting configurations very well so it was easy to learn how he does his magic.

The only gripe I had about this presentation was that it lacked any handout notes so you are left with the decision to scribble notes or pay attention. I elected to just pay attention and listen as well as doing a few photos of the projectors so I could have visual notes to refer to later.

Joe McNally’s Afternoon Presentation

Joe McNally rocked the house right away with his killer presentation
Copyright © Ron Martinsen – All Rights Reserved

Joe McNally started his afternoon presentation exactly as you would hope after reading his awesome books The Moment It Clicks and Hot Shoe Diaries – with a hole shitload of gelled SB-900 flashes. He had the room lit up in blue and even featured jumps with electric guitars for a shot that makes you bend down and realize you aren’t worthy. Of course Joe made it all look so easy and did a great job of explaining how to get the amazing shots he does day in and out.

Black Swan attendee gets are 15 minutes of fame
Copyright © Ron Martinsen – All Rights Reserved

Just as Joe promised on his blog, attendees with the best costumes were featured as models during his shoot. Unlike David who just talked about his shots and showed a presentation of his setups, Joe let it all hang out and just setup up the lights (with a team of assistants) and actually made the photos he would discuss.

Another local attendee gets the limelight in her “70’s” outfit
Copyright © Ron Martinsen – All Rights Reserved

It was awesome to see Joe in action and see how he pulls off his magic. It was also interesting to note that he was fairly open to questions while he worked so you were able to see and hear his thought process (and see his miscues) in what it takes to get the shots that he does.

Conclusion

Everybody respects these guys for their body of work and what they’ve given back to the photography community in their blogs. However, it was a real honor to see these masters of the speedlite show how they build up to get the great shots that they get.

I’m a Canon shooter so I was worried how much I’d really get out of this presentation, but it was done in a way that your flash system really doesn’t matter. It was disappointing that there were special offers for pocket wizards for Nikon only and not Canon as well, but beyond that there wasn’t much ill will towards Canon shooters.

It was fast paced and informative, and a no brainer for the price. I highly recommend this tour if you are lucky enough to get a ticket before they sell out in a city near you.

Visit the Flash Bus Tour web site for more information.

Disclosure

I attended at my own expense (full price) and receive no compensation for your participating in the Flash Bus Tour. I only submit this article to you as a public service and as a token of appreciation to Joe and David for their great show today.

Photo Thoughts– To Liquify Or Not To Liquify, That Is The Question!

Mouse over to see the version without liquify enhancements on the face
Copyright ® Ron Martinsen – ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

One secret of the trade for fashion editing is the liquify filter in Photoshop. The way this tool works is that you can use the forward warp tool to do things like slim the jaw line or love handles, the pucker tool to make teeth or noses smaller, and the bloat tool to give the lips that digital Botox look or increase the size of the eyes. It’s a pretty powerful tool that works amazingly well, but you have to be careful and gentle as a little goes a long way and it is very easy to screw things up.

Here’s what the Liquify filter window looks like:

Photoshop CS4 Liquify Filter Window

Here’s a little video that demonstrates the use of the Liquify filter on this image:

*** CLICK HERE for HD Version ***

Here is my layers palette that shows all of my enhancements to this  photo:

I started off with the in-camera jpg from my Canon 5D Mark II because it was good enough (but I always have the RAW too). Here’s a before and after that shows what the unprocessed raw versus the jpeg looks like:

Mouse over to see the default RAW jpeg
versus the in-camera JPEG

After deciding up on the JPEG to save time, I began to remove the blemishes on a empty layer. I do this because it takes up less memory (both RAM while working and disk space when saving).

I was using Photoshop CS5 on my MacBook Pro when editing so the content-aware healing brush was great. After about 3 minutes I had the blemishes removed so I went to my favorite skin softening product – Portraiture and only applied it to the skin areas (by default it wanted to put it on the teeth and eyes too.

Next up I selected the teeth and created a hue/saturation adjustment layer where I decreased the saturation of the yellow channel by 20% and increased the lightness of the master channel by 5%.

From there I did a little dodge on the iris and eye whites to brighten them up and then a burn on the pupil and edge of the iris. I then did a high-pass filter on the eyes using an overlay blending mode to give the eyes the wet glassy look I like.

Now I was effectively done with this shot, although I should have done my LAB Color adjustment that is part of Scott Kelby’s 7 Point System. I forgot and did it AFTER the liquify (hey, shit happens in real life).

Last up I added my creative sharpening using Sharpener Pro. That was it.

For the Normal Version I just did the LAB Color and Sharpening without the Liquify layer. Here’s a before and after of the in-camera jpeg versus the edited version without liquify (see the top of the article to compared the final liquify versus non-liqufy versions):

Mouse over to see the in-camera JPEG
versus my edited version without liquify

Disclosure

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Check out the new Stuff on Sale section

I’m always getting email from my partners about special deals, but I hate posting articles about them because I know that to some of my readers it feels like spam. I need to do it sometimes because my partners are what make this blog tick and I want to keep them happy, but generally speaking I’d rather not.

To address this dilemma I’ve decided to create the Stuff on Sale tab at the top of this blog so you have a place where you can see the latest and greatest deals if you are interested, but you don’t have to get bombarded by spam. Hopefully people will like this better and it will give me an opportunity to put more of these offers from my partners on line for your those who want to save more money than they already do from my discount coupon code page.

Best wishes,
Ron

Photo of the Week Winner

Congratulations to Ronald Scherpenisse for making the most out of a cloudy day to come up with this very cool shot. Sure there is some post-processing voodoo here, but that’s what makes it cool! Keep this in mind when you look outside on a dreary day and think to yourself that there’s nothing to shoot!

Be sure to click this photo above and leave some feedback on Flickr so this reader can get your feedback both good and bad (be gentle) and feel the love from our readers here!

Learn more about how you can participate in the Photo of the Week contest by clicking here.