Introduction to Photographic Lighting
This class will provide you with a solid foundation in photographic lighting techniques. You'll learn to make the most of both on and off-camera strobes. We'll introduce a variety of different lighting techniques and styles, and you'll have a chance to try out a variety of equipment from small portable speedlights to professional quality studio strobes. If you've ever felt intimidated by your flash, now's your chance to get friendly with it - once you do, new possibilities will open up for your images. This class will assume a solid understanding of basic photographic concepts - you should already be familiar with exposure, be comfortable with operating your camera and understand such concepts as aperture, shutter speed, depth of field, etc. If you have any questions about prerequisites, please don't hesitate to email us. You'll need an SLR camera, preferably with some type of flash unit, but if you don't own one yet, that's OK too - we'll talk about equipment and discuss various options to help guide your future purchases.

The class will last about six hours, half of which will consist of hands-on shooting time to reinforce the concepts we're discussing. We'll be covering a lot of ground, and we'll make sure to maximize your understanding of the topic by providing some time to practice. The class will take place at Beatnik Studios - a beautiful, professional quality photography studio and gallery in downtown Sacramento - a great location for a class with lots of space and many possibilities for interesting lighting and locations. Lunch and snacks will be provided.

The instructor for this class (Scott Fischbein) has an extensive background in professional lighting techniques and has been teaching for over 20 years. He has a knack for making complicated technical topics understandable. If you have any questions about the class or the prerequisites, please don't hestitate to shoot him an email. You can see some of his work here:
Weddings, Personal work on Flickr. Here's a comment from a student in one of his recent lighting workshops: "I love that you're able to explain it in English (as opposed to Geek)....your analogies and explanations were very helpful. "

Is this workshop right for me?
Consider these questions:
1) You're shooting with off-camera flash, your aperture is f/8, your shutter speed is 1/250, ISO 200. You find that your subject is well lit with light from the flash, but your background, which is ambient light and not lit by the flash, is a bit dark. In order to adjust the ambient light without adjusting the flash exposure, what do you do?
2) You're shooting a portrait with a 3' softbox, and it's about 4 feet away from your subject. You'd like the light to be a little bit softer, more diffuse, with gentler highlight/shadow transitions. What do you do?
3) You're outside on a cloudy day with nice, dramatic skies. You want to keep those skies nicely exposed, but you're not a landscape photographer, you want a person in the shot, and you want that person nicely exposed as well. What do you do?

If you can immediately provide a number of different answers to these three questions, the workshop will probably be a bit basic for you, or may serve as a review and a chance to practice some of these techniques. If you have absolutely no idea what the questions even mean (ie: what the heck is "aperture") then the workshop will be a bit too advanced - you're better off with an "introduction to digital photography" class (coming soon!). IF you basically get the gist of the questions but aren't sure how to answer some or all of them, this workshop will be perfect for you, and you'll go home able to answer all of them. If you have any questions, feel free to email Scott.

You can RSVP on the meetup site, but you will only be considered registered for the class when you pay through Paypal. We'll be limiting participation to 16 photographers in order to keep the group manageable, and since we've gotten lots of requests for a workshop like this, we expect it to sell out, so please pay as soon as possible so you don't get shut out. If you haven't submitted payment within 24 hours of RSVPing, your RSVP will be removed to make room for other participants.Paypal payment is here.