This is Stacy. I did this shoot back in August and I’m just now blogging about it, so shoot me! Anyway, Stacy has a great story to tell. Here is a small excerpt from her website:

If you would have told me a year ago that within the next 12 months I would lose 55lbs, compete and place in a fitness competition, become a spokesmodel, then travel to different states to go on TV and tell my story,  and have commercials nationwide, I would have laughed in your face… maybe even thought it was a cruel joke.

You can read the rest of her story here.

I came across Stacy’s profile on ModelMayhem right after I moved here and she definitely had a fitness look to her so I sent her a message and then didn’t hear anything, until a few weeks later when she finally got back to me. We set up a shoot at one of the gyms where she works and had a lot of fun working together to create lots of different images.

I’ve worked with Stacy since this first shoot and she’s great to work with; laid back, fun, open to lots of ideas. Watch for a blog post in the future (whenever I get around to posting it) about the second shoot we did.

But first, let me share a few of my favorite pictures from our first shoot. We ended up doing a combination of both fitness and sexy; the shot above being very fitness-oriented. My typical sport/fitness lighting: to bare rim lights and a soft main light, some fancy Photoshop work and voila, the shot you see at the top of this post.

Like I said, we also did some sexier pictures; since we were shooting at a gym there was a room full of mirrors and I wanted to take advantage of that. Aside from making the lighting terribly difficult to work with the mirrors ended up giving us a pretty sweet shot:

This was just two lights, one on each side, one with an umbrella and one with a softbox.

After doing the safer shots we decided to have a little fun with water. Now, I can’t take credit for this next shot; I got the idea from this shot on Flickr by Ender Nguyen. Ever since I saw that shot I wanted to recreate something similar, and Stacy was willing so we made it happen:

I set the lights up (an umbrella for on axis fill and a grid spot for the key) and then had Stacy run into the shower and get wet and then come back out. I shoot this on my portable 5×7 black/white background and then added the rain later in Photoshop. It turned out pretty well; though I could have done a little better job on the rain splashes.

Once Stacy had enough of the cold water and running back and forth we wrapped up our shoot pretty quickly after that, but not before shooting this one real quick:

This was just done against a white wall with the same setup as before: umbrella fill and gridded key.

There were a lot more great shots from this shoot, but these are some of my favorites. I have lots more from our second shoot to share with you (hopefully) soon.

Stacy and I are also working on putting together a very cool themed third shoot that I will share at some point. Stay tuned for more!

Shortly after I moved to Colorado I came across Denise, a fitness model here in Denver, who wanted some new swimsuit shots (I think there was an ex-boyfriend to make jealous as well , so I was happy to help out. I wanted the shots to have a beach/ocean feel to them so we ended up shooting at Cherry Creek State Park in Denver, which was happy to give us the look we wanted.

We ended up shooting while it was fairly bright out, which, like always, poses problems for small flash shooters like myself. For the shot above, Denise was probably 10-15 feet out in the water while I was shooting from the beach. I was shooting at f/8, which at that distance is tough for modified small flashes, so I just went bare flash on this one, held by her son on camera left at 1/2 power. I had him hold it vertically, to get some more light on her, and I made sure he held it at such an angle to not create ugly, harsh shadows. The sun on camera right added a nice, warm rim light.

As a side note, I’d just like to mention that if you are shooting on a beach, wear flip flops and shorts, not jeans and tennis shoes; otherwise you’ll come home all dirty and wet. I learned that the hard way…

After we had our fun playing in the water we took to the beach:

The sun was starting to set behind the ridge, and being the sucker that I am for shooting into the sun, I couldn’t resist. At least now that we were back on the beach I could get my light fairly close, so I shot through a white umbrella for this shot, which was high camera left. The beach was fairly busy with boat traffic that had to be edited out, along with cleaning up some trash from the beach.

After I had my share of getting dirty on the beach I had Denise take a turn and lay down:

This time I decided to milk the sun and create some flare, so I shot at f/18, which gave us a nice flare, and darkened the beach up nicely, which really helped create the illusion of a beach sunset, even though it was still fairly bright out. At f/18 bare flash is the only way to go, so I had her son hold the flush up again, bare and high camera left to create some nice light on Denise and the beach surrounding her. From my shooting position most hard shadows are avoided, as they are cast where the camera can’t see.

The sun went down pretty fast after this, so we packed up and headed out. Denise has lots of experience and was great to work with and I think we ended up with some really awesome shots. Hopefully we can collaborate again in the future…

After I made the move to Colorado I came across a local photographer, Rob Hammer, who’s work I admired. While looking through some of his images I saw a model that lived down in Colorado Springs that I thought would be awesome to do a series with. Meet Carissa, a fitness model who is awesome to work with. After talking back and forth for a while we decided to do a 4-part series called “Master of the Elements” where we take Carissa and put her in environment related to the four elements: earth, wind, water, fire (think Captain Planet, without the useless “Heart” element). I wanted the shoots to have a fitness feel, but still have some amount of sexiness to them.

The first shot we decided to do was the water shot, and Carissa knew of this pretty cool waterfall down in Colorado Springs called Graffiti Falls that we decided to shoot at. My idea for the water shoot was a very cool image featuring Carissa waist deep in the water looking fit and sexy. That was no problem  for Carissa, but the rest of the shoot provided some hurdles to overcome.

First, the water was very brown, due to lots of rain we got got ever the weekend – which really takes away from the coolness I wanted to depict. I shifted my white balance to Tungsten to get me some of the way there, but it didn’t help much. That’s ok, it can be fixed in post processing. The second issue was that Carissa had to get awfully close to the waterfall to be waist deep, even when kneeling, and I wasn’t comfortable getting that close with my equipment, so I had to shoot from pretty far back, which created more problems.

Since I wasn’t willing to take my flashes close to Carissa (I’ve had issue with water and flashes in the past) I had to keep it close to me, which was a good 50-100ft from the model, meaning I couldn’t use any modifiers, so I had to shoot bare, full zoom flash, with a full CTO gel to help compensate for the Tungsten white balance, and even then I was shooting at full power to get enough light to Carissa as it was fairly bright out so I was shooting f/8 at 1/200 of a second. I did have my flash wrapped in a plastic bag for extra protection, though.

The other issue was that I was still in a pretty high splash zone while shooting, so after 2-3 shots I’d have to stop and wipe my lens off in order to shoot a couple more and repeat. It worked out ok though because I was waiting on those full power flash recycles, so I had some time to spare. The water was cold, so we didn’t get too many shots off before we wrapped up this part of the shoot.

It worked out well though; with some creative post-processing we ended up with the shot above as our final image for the “Water” portion of our series. While we were there we shot a few other things, just to have some fun:

It was a great shoot and we got some nice images from it. Carissa was willing to do whatever it took to get the shot, which was awesome. I just finished up the “Earth” portion of our series with her that I should be posting (hopefully) soon. I’m looking forward to the other shoots with Carissa, just need to come up with a few great ideas first…

For a while now I’ve had this idea to do a shoot with a girl dressed up all cute and sexy playing video games – maybe it’s because I’m a big nerd at heart or maybe it’s because I thought lots of guys would love the images. For whatever reason, I was determined to do this shoot, and then I finally found the right girl on Model Mayhem – she was cute and nerdy, so it was perfect. After some back and forth we finally settled on a date for the shoot, but we didn’t know where we were going to shoot yet. Then she had this great idea…

Here in Springfield there is this neat little arcade downtown called 1984, which is owned by a bunch of friends that had collected several vintage arcade machines over the years that decided to open up a place, charge a cover, and let people have free reign over these classic games like 1942, Pac-Man, and Spy Hunter. She suggested that we contact the owner and see if he would be willing to let us shoot there.  I figured it was a long shot, but I gave him a call and he was more than happy to let us shoot there. In fact, he was pretty cool overall after we met him the night of the shoot.

We had the place to ourselves because we shot there on one of the nights where they aren’t open, so it was perfect. The owner, Devin, went out of his way to make the shoot happen and to make it fun. He gave our model the “I’m to sexy for my bow” shirt seen in the first shot to wear for the shoot and let her keep it afterwards. He helped us turn on the machines and let us shoot whatever we want, wherever we want. He even busted out his camera and shot some behind-the-scenes footage of us doing our thing, which was cool. All of that in exchange for some prints, which I happily ordered for him and personally delivered to Devin, along with our model, Jessica (along with some business cards featuring one of the images from the shoot to hand out).

The shot above is the shot I used for the business cards.

I’ll talk briefly about my lighting setup for these shots and work my way down the post.

The first shot was actually the last one we did, and the most complicated. It was a three-light setup with a Nikon SB-800 behind the camera into my 60″ umbrella for some fill, a Nikon SB-600 camera right through a white umbrella for the main light, and a Nikon SB-600 bare to cast some light on the first on the wall (and it blew out the side of the register, which I should have caught). Pretty much all of these shots had some slower shutter speeds and higher ISOs to let some of the ambient arcade machine light bleed into the image.

The second shot was a single light into a collapsed silver umbrella on camera left – I love the reflection it created, but at the same time I wish I would have had a polarizing filter to kill the reflection and see more of the pinball machine.  The third shot is the exact same setup, just a different pose/composition combination.

These next two shots were a two-light cross light setup, with the SB-800 clamped to one of the machines through a Lumiquest SBIII camera right and an SB-600 with a Honl grid back camera left from some rim/seperation.

The last shot I’m going to talk about was actually the first one we did. I stuck her into this old Star Wars arcade machine and added some fill from the top via a clamped SB-600 into a silver umbrella and then I stuck the SB-800 through the Lumiquest SBIII for the key light:

The idea was to look like she was being lit from the machine itself – I think it works pretty well.

I think this shoot turned out really well and I’d like to do a follow-up session with her that’s more home and console oriented.  I’ve got some cool ideas for that shoot as well.

I hope you guys enjoyed this one as much as I did shooting it!

Happy Valentine’s Day! I’m going to keep this post pretty brief because it’s keeping me from spending time with my girlfriend, Josi, but I wanted to take a few minutes and share a couple of pictures from a recent session I did with Josi’s friend, Wing.

We decided to head downtown at night to get some cool urban night shots, which is cool, but the bad part about this was the fact that it was freezing out. Since it was so cold, and since we were shooting at night, I decided to stick with my 50mm f/1.8 for low-light shooting and a single light stand with a Nikon SB-600 and a Westcott 28″ Apollo softbox. I didn’t want to lug around a bunch of gear in the cold, so I kept it simple and made what I brought with me work.

We started with a fun kissy-face shot, above, and then moved on to a couple shot as Wing’s boyfriend came along for moral support. Here they are in the doorway of this cool old building downtown:

He’s quite a bit taller than her, which made it hard to get a good shot of them together, but I think this one turned out pretty well.

After that we headed to the top of one of the parking garages downtown (as seen in this post) to finish up and I snapped another, sexier, kissy-face shot of Wing in a nice evening dress:

At this point we both had had enough of the cold and decided to call it quits for the evening, but not before I snapped over 200 shots, which was way more than I had anticipated shooting. I’ve got a few others I’ll share as I get them edited.

I’ve also got another shoot coming up this week that I’m excited about. Hopefully I can get everything edited by next Sunday so that I can share them with you then. I think you’ll like them.

Some of the shots are shots I’ve shown before, but I also want to share a few new ones we took just for the calendar, so here is a preview of the 2010 Kristen Calendar!

February

June

August

November

The rest were either too revealing or not as exciting as these. It took a long time to put this together, even with re-using some shots that we had done in the past. I think we did 3 or 4 separate shoots to get the missing months and then we tried different ideas for each month. Then there was all of the editing and post-production to be done. We spent a lot of time together working on this, so I hope her boyfriend appreciates it.

If you want to know more about how a shot was lit you can click the image to go to it’s Flickr page and read more about it. This is definitely something I’d like to offer to other people, but because of the amount of time and planning involved it wouldn’t be something cheap. If you conservatively plan for an hour per month for shooting, you’re at 12 hours already, plus a few hours for planning, and then probably at least another hour per month for post-production and you’re looking at about a 30 hour project, minimum. At commercial photographer rates you’re looking at about 3-4 days worth of creative fees, which could run anywhere from $500/day to $10,000/day, or if I were to just charge a very nice hourly rate of $20/hour you’re still looking at $600 minimum, or a more realistic hourly rate of $50 or more would push it up to $1,500 or more. I’d settle for a happy medium around $1000, depending on the shoots you would want.

So, it wouldn’t be a cheap project/present, but it would definitely be unique. A one-of-a-kind calendar for that special someone in your life. I’d definitely be willing to do it again, so if you’re interested in getting a calendar made and are willing to put in the time and effort and can afford it, shoot me an email and we can make it happen!

I finally got around to getting Jessica and Sa’dia their CDs from this shoot so I figured it should blog about it too, ya know, for good measure.  We did the shoot almost a month ago, but we’ve all been busy so we haven’t had time to meet up until now – it’s NOT because I’m a slacker.  Well, I am a slacker, but usually not when it comes to my pictures.  Anyway…

I just wanted to share a couple of pictures from this shoot.  I had two goals when I agreed to this shoot – shoot most of it at night and try some new things.  The picture above pretty much sums it up.  I think we had a lot of fun trying new things, which is what all three of us wanted.  When I sent this shot above to the two models I said it represents the shoot because it is “fun, different, and unique.”  Works for me.  I don’t have setup shots for these pics, but I’ll quickly run through the setups, though they are pretty easy to figure out.  The one above was at ISO 800 and 1/10 sec to bleed in the ambient and still let me shoot at f/8.  The girls are lit by a single shoot-through umbrella camera left and the flare is created by an Sb-600 at low power handheld by my buddy, Aaron.

Now on to a couple shots of each girl by themselves.  Continuing with the flare concept we’ve got Jess:

If you haven’t noticed by now I kinda dig the whole flare thing, whether its a sun flare or flash flare.  So I tried to work it into some of my night shots by using my SB-600 instead of the sun.  It creates a nice rim/separation light and also creates that beautiful flare.  The key light was the SB-800 camera left in the Westcott Apollo 28″ softbox.  I think I’m going to order a 60″ convertible umbrella in the near future to play with.  I want to do some full body stuff and most of my current modifiers don’t spread light that much.

Now, here is Sa’dia by herself:

I love the way this one turned out.  I like the warm colors in the background and the soft light up front.  Combined I think it creates a very compelling, inviting image.  Plus, that look.  Her eyes just draw you right in.  Very nice and very simple.  Sometimes it’s the simple shots that turn out the best over the complex ones.

That’s it for this post.  I’ll have another one soon as I just got back from Don Giannatti‘s Lighting Essentials workshop and I have a bunch of pictures from that to share.  Stay tuned!

Sounds like an interesting album title.  And if it was, in fact, an album title, this shot above would be the album cover.  This is a quick shot I grabbed in between fountains when Kristen had a little time to dry off.  I love trying to overpower the sun with little speedlights.  I’ve been doing it more and more.  For this one I used both my Nikon SB-800 and SB-600 at full power through a white umbrella – and it was JUST out of the frame camera left, in fact, I think I had to crop this one because it was in the shot.  Trying to get f/18 out of flashes is asking a lot, but they performed admirably.

Before I go any further I need to tell a little back story about this shoot. The first shoot I did with Kristen ended at one of these fountains, but unfortunately for us we got there too late and it had already shut off for the night, so we both left empty handed.  Well, we got some great shots from the rest of the shoot, but we missed out on that fountain shot, so we decided to do a new shoot dedicated to ONLY fountains.

The first fountain we shot was at Founder’s Park here in Springfield.  Unfortunately for us, right before we got there some guy cut his foot open real bad and bled all over the place – they called an ambulance and everything.  So, we were pretty hesitant to do much in the fountain, but we managed to grab a few shots real quick without having to get into the water much – just staying at the edges and we ended up with one of my favorites from the shoot:

The sun was still pretty high and bright, so we were avoiding it like the plague and using one SB-800 to create our own main light.  I think it worked out pretty well.  I’m working on doing some stuff to this one in Photoshop, so once I get that done I’ll try and remember to share with you guys.

After we bailed from the dangers of this fountain we headed up to the square where they have this really cool fountain.  I’d seen some cool shots done here so I figured it was my turn to see what I could do.  Last time I was shooting with flash around water I almost lost my SB-800, so I was being extra careful this time.  Kristen’s friend Amanda came with us on the shoot so I had her standing in the fountain holding my light stand to make sure the wind didn’t blow it in. That would have been bad.

We tried all kinds of different poses in this fountain, but the one that really stood out to me is this one:

I’m not sure what it is – the pose? The look?  But something about this picture really draws me in.  It feels like it should be in a magazine (to me at least).  I have a few other shots that have her legs in them too, but even without them I feel this is a more powerful shot.

The last fountain for the day was in Jordan Valley Park, where the first shot of this post was taken.  The main fountain there runs on a timer, so while we were waiting I grabbed the shot above.  This is one of those fountains that shoots water way far up in the air, so I moved my flash back pretty far and zoomed it in so I could still light up Kristen and keep my flash from getting wet.  I was using it bare, no modifiers, but Kristen has the body and face to handle it, so I wasn’t worried.  Here’s what we got:

Pretty cool.  I really like how the water kind of wraps around her and brings your eyes right to the center of the picture.  I used a slow enough shutter speed to smooth out the water from the fountain but then that flick of light from the flash really sharpens Kristen to make a sweet picture.

That’s it for this shoot.  I think it was a lot of fun for the both of us, and I really enjoyed have a fairly solid concept to work with for this shoot.  I’d like to come up with a solid personal project for me to work on focusing around a good, solid concept, so if anyone has any ideas, please let me know!

Case in point.  This shot wasn’t planned and was completely random, but it turned out pretty sweet none-the-less.  Jason, Eliesha, and myself were downtown doing a mini-group shoot with Nikki and Christie.  I was setting up some lights for when Nikki arrived and this guy walked by and was like “Yo man! Take my picture!” and I couldn’t resist.  He hopped in and told me I only get one shot, so I made some final tweaks to my settings when he posed for me and I snapped my one shot. A little post-processing in Lightroom and I’d say it turned out pretty good.

Now, let’s look at a few pictures from the planned shoot…

First up is Christie.  She’s a recent High School grad that Jason and Eliesha met one weekend while doing a big group shoot with the local camera club. We had her come down so we could do some practicing.

This was one of the shots she wanted to do.  She wanted to go up in the parking garage and look out over the new Hollywood Theater so along with those I grabbed some lower shots of her just looking off in the distance.  I really like shots like this…not sure why.  All of the shots we did during this shoot were done in or around this parking garage (the same garage where I shot my Week 3 series).

While I was waiting for Jason and Eliesha to finish up with Nikki downstairs I stuck Christie into the stairwell and had some fun with the sun:

I really like the lighting, composition, and colors in this shot.  I’m a big fan of the solar flares lately too.  I continue to try and work them into my shots when I can.  Using speedlights to overpower the sun like this is no easy task, especially when trying to diffuse it like I was here.  I think I’ll try some more bare flash shots when using the sun for a flare in the future and see how those turn out.

Right before sunset we all met up on top of the garage to get some shots of the city and sunset in the background.

After the sun was mostly gone I took advantage of the deep blue sky and threw a two-light setup at Christie doing a hard/soft combo:

This was a little while after the sun was gone, so I was working pretty fast, dropping my shutter speed every few shots to keep up.  This one was at 1/25 at ISO 200, so it was before I had to start bumping the ISO up, but it’s slow enough you can see a little ghosting in the shot.  The hard/soft crosslight combo works well here though and I dig the contrast in colors between her outfit and the sky.

Time for Nikki.

Nikki is a local singer/songwriter that Jason found and had her come down to shoot with us at the same time we were shooting with Christie, so we traded off models and photographers throughout the shoot to give everyone good exposure to everyone else and to make sure we all got a variety of shots.

My favorites of Nikki are all from the last part of the shoot during sunset and after the sun was gone.

Right before the sun dipped past the horizon I got this shot.  Another one were I was using both speedlights to overpower the sun to get the cool flare.  I was ONLY at around f/10 here so I didn’t have to blast them at full power, but it definitely strained the batteries.  It was worth it though to get a cool shot like this.

Another great shot of Nikki is this one:

Once the sun was gone we got this really cool color gradient in the sky that worked great as a background.  By boosting the colors it also brought out the blue in Nikki’s eyes that really make this picture pop.  The lighting on this one was a new setup (to me) but I liked the way it turned out so I may use it again in the future.  One flash on either side of her at about a 45 degree angle created an interesting hard light that worked well for her.

The last shot I got of Nikki was after the sun was all the way gone and all we had were the city lights down below.  I had Nikki leave over the railing and lit her from the side to get a nice balance of flash and ambient:

There were several from this series that I liked, but I went with this one as it was a nice balance of foreground and background and her eyes are just so engaging in this shot.  It’s hard NOT to stare into them.  The bokeh from the large aperture works great here too!

That’s it for this shoot.  I’m almost done catching up with blog posts for past shoots.  Watch for a couple more soon!

First, as I mentioned in an earlier post, is that I ordered Joe McNally‘s new book, The Hot Shoe Diaries, which came in a few weeks ago.  This book rocks!  I read through all of it in a matter of days and I’m re-reading it now.  Joe is really a genius and I would give just about anything to be able to work with him, but since that is probably never going to happen, this book is the next best thing.  You get some great insight to how Joe thinks and works and his approach to taking great pictures.

I’ve also been enjoying Joe’s training videos over at Kelby Training.  He has some great videos that go along with some of the photos from The Hot Shoe Diaries, which is nice.  I signed up for a one-month membership and I’m trying to get through as much training as I can.  Lots of great stuff there.  Speaking of Kelby Training – Scott Kelby, along with Matt Kloskowski, have been doing a weekly web series for Nikon shooters called D-Town TV.  There are some great tips there and a good watch every week.

Ok, on to the shoots.

Back in the middle of March I headed to the park to do some nice casual portraits of my friend Mandy.  I was out shooting with my SB-800 and triggering via CLS (which is awesome).  I’m really trying to fully master a single light source, so this is my go-to light (until I can afford an SB-900).  I got several good shots from that shoot, but I wanted to share one of my favorites:

This was shot with the SB-800 through a white umbrella on camera right at 1/4 power at 1/200 at f/5.6.  Very nice, saturated background and a great exposure on Mandy.  The look and the wind really add some flavor.  Speaking of wind, that shit is dangerous (as you’ll find out later).  Knocked my stand over many times and messed up my umbrella and stand a little.  I really need to get me some sand bags.

Last weekend I drove down to Joplin, Missouri for a little photog/model group shoot which was pretty fun.  The day went pretty well – got some great shots, got some exercise climbing all over rocks and trees, got some sun (a little too much), met some new people.  Almost too good to be true.  The wind was pretty strong that day, so my lighting stuff took a few tumbles, but for the most part it did well, especially when I was shooting with no modifiers, just zoomed flash, like this shot:

That was just a single SB-800 zoomed to 105mm with a full CTO gel plus and extra 1/2 CTO gel.  The camera was set to Tungsten white balance to get the cool feel.  The sun was pretty bright most of the day so I was pretty much at max sync speed (or higher with Auto-FP) and smaller apertures.  This shot was done at 1/200 at f/8.  Working close these little flashes work great, even with the bright sun.

After everyone shot at the park for a few hours we headed over to The Falls in Joplin to do some bikini shoots with the weather being nice and all.  Unfortunately this is when things start to take a turn for the worse.  We got to the falls around 2:00 or 3:00pm, so the sun was straight overhead with no cloud coverage whatsoever, which means I’m shooting at 1/200 at f/16 on IS 100 (usually I shoot 200 since that’s what most Nikons are optimized for) to get anywhere close to a proper exposure.  Forget about Auto-FP sync at f/16 – it’s not going to happen with just one Speedlight (maybe if I had a tree of Speedlights like Joe McNally did in the desert (p.259 in Hot Shoe Diaries)).

So, I’ve got one of the models out on a rock in the water and I’m several feet back trying to shoot some full body shots, hoping my SB-800 at 105mm on full power can get out there and through a little fill into my subject.  Not happening.  And just to make sure it wasn’t going to happen, the wind picks up and pushes my light stand over – right into the water!  Granted it wasn’t very deep, but still, my SB-800 went face first right into the water…not good.  So, I run over and pull it out and immediately turn it off and take the batteries out.  While maintaining a calm exterior but screaming “Oh my god, my flash!” on the inside I went over and finished that series with the model.  The whole time I was being nice and calm on the outside and freaking out on the inside.

I take my flash up the car and let it start drying out, but I wasn’t done.  There were still models I wanted to work with and shots I wanted to try, so I had to keep going.  I pulled out the trusty old Nikon SB-24 and some Cactus triggers and went back down to the falls to finish up.  Glad I came back because I managed to get this shot:

This was done with the SB-24 zoomed to its max of 85mm at full power and my camera set to 1/200 at f/13.  I wish I could have gotten the background slightly underexposed, but with the sun like that I was happy to just get some decent pictures.  Always have a backup handy.

So, I got some good shots but I might have lost my SB-800, and I definitely wasn’t looking forward to shelling out $450 for an SB-900 (even though I really want one…that’s a lot of cash).  On Monday I went to the local camera shop and got like 50 silica gel packets and packed my SB-800 with them and through it in a ziploc bag hoping they would pull all of the moisture out.  I fired it up today and everything appears to be working fine.  I tried it on the hot shoe, as a remote, manual power, TTL, no hiccups.  Bullet dodged…for now.  Hopefully it doesn’t slowly deteriorate.

Long story short, flashes and water don’t mix!  Be careful with your equipment when working around water…