I took the Small Flash Workshop offered by Algonquin College in early November and was really impressed with it. It was a weekend course, 9-4 both days, in which I learned so much. The instructor, Ray Pilon, was absolutely amazing. He was definitely passionate about photography but also realistic in what could be achieved nowadays in terms of a career in the field. He was able to communicate and pass on information and knowledge pertaining to photography, flash units and lighting specifically, in a way that was understandable and seemed to stick.
The class size, though abnormal, was very small. There were only three other students in the course. We were told that normally the class size is somewhere from 10-16, so still very manageable and definitely still room and time for some one-on-one learning with the instructor.
As there were so few people in the workshop, we were able to get quite far off-topic and still manage to be ahead of schedule by the end of the first day. I was the only person in the workshop using a Nikon camera, which turned out to be to my advantage as the instructor was a Nikon user and allowed me to use all of his expensive (and very pretty) equipment including his high-end flash units and flash remotes.
We learned everything about our off-camera flash units from how to turn them on and what the different buttons on the rear of the units did to how to bounce them off the ceiling and control them remotely. I learned how to control my SB-600 flash unit with the instructors SB-800 and SB-900, and learned that my SB-600 cannot control anything above itself. At this moment I was certain I was going to buy a SB-800 very soon to be able to do remote flash photographs. That is until the instructor showed me how to control my SB-600 with my on-camera flash. It was incredibly awesome and filled me with delight. That night I went home and showed Dave all the neat things I had learned, the biggest one being how to remotely control my flash.
We did multiple assignment while we were in the workshop including portraiture using a technique called "dragging the shutter" (where you set your shutter speed to match the ambient lighting rather than your sync speed) and portraiture using a simple umbrella kit. We also learned how to fill flash effectively.
We also learned about flash accessories like Gary Fongs and regular diffusers and the advantages, and disadvantages, of different kinds.
All in all, this was the best course (workshop or full length course) I have taken at Algonquin yet and I HIGHLY recommend it to anyone who owns a off-camera flash for their dSLR and wants to be able to take full advantage of it. It is more of an intermediate course, as though it does start off with the basics, it moves into more advance techniques in a matter of minutes on the first day. I felt the hands-on portion of the class, and the amount of it, was very useful and the theory parts of it were very applicable and not as dry as one would expect. Like I said before, the instructor's passion for photography is evident and really makes the learning experience that much better. I am sure I have missed some key moments of the course in this brief synopsis of it, as even in writing this post I have gotten re-excited for flash photography and want to go use all my equipment and the techniques learnt in the course.
If you would like to see some of the techniques in action, I was able to use them the very next day in my Portrait assignment for my Composition and Design course - in which I received my highest grade of this course. See these posts here and here for images taken during that assignment which use some of the techniques like dragging the shutter, fill flash and remote off-camera flash usage.
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I shot the first image (the watches) by using a 9x36 strip soft box on the background and a 24x32 on the right of the subject. White reflectors were also placed on the left of the image to bounce light back into the image. The second one was a bit trickier as the thermos was quite reflective. I ended up using a grid light coming in from the left of the frame through a diffuser, a 24x32 soft box on the right and a boom soft box above. The boom soft box had no light in it, it was merely used to reflect white from above onto the subject.
I bought this one day before my second PHO5598 course as it is pretty much mandatory for completion of the course. This item itself isn’t essentially, but the ability to plug into the studio lights using a synch cord is and my camera (Nikon d80) doesn’t have that ability without this accessory.
