I taught at a local college today. A real pleasure, teaching bright young enthusiasts.

However, due to scheduling the two hour lecture turned into a barely one-hour lecture. This forced me to take some shortcuts. I taught some fast hands-on lessons. One was how to shoot indoors with a bounced on-camera flash. The other lesson was all about studio light.

“Studio? But surely, Michael, that takes a lot of time”, I hear you say.

Not necessarily.

1. Set the cameras to 100 ISO, 1/125th second, f/8.
2. Attach a sending Pocketwizard to the camera.
3. Put up one strobe on a light stand.
4. Attach a receiving Pocketwizard to it.
5. Fire into an umbrella (I could not find a white shoot-through umbrella quickly).
6. Set it up 45 degrees to the side of your subject, 45 degrees up.
7. Fire and meter the light using a light meter. Adjust light until the meter reads f/8.
8. add  a reflector on the opposite side to bounce back a little light.

What does that get me?

This:

Nice light, nice catch light. So I handed the Pocketwizards to the students,one by one. They all got similar shots.

Why did I say I would have preferred a shoot through umbrella? Here’s why:

See the flash in the umbrella? If we had shot through, no flash would have been visible.

But that’s a minor quibble. Nice portrait, took only a minute or two.