Big Lights Far Away!

Last weekend I had the pleasure of taking the "Big Lights Far Away" (BLFA) workshop in Vancouver Canada taught by amazing commercial photographer Martin Prihoda. It was a 3-day affair which combined classroom lecture and several location shoots. Martin and his crew lined up the equipment (a truckload) and the models and we went crazy! We shot 4 locations (not counting the hockey bar after the shoot) and 9 set-ups in 2 days. The BLFA workshops don't happen very often so if you are interested you should jump on it, there is nothing else like it out there. I first heard of Martin on the Strobist website last year and have been following his blog ever since. He is very knowledgeable and is open to sharing anything he knows about the world of commercial photography. Besides the other participants and Martin's crew, who were all great to work with, I met Makeup Artist Briana Scott, Fashion Stylist Paulo Vallejo, and models Siobhan and Clare from the LizBell Agency. Here is a small selection of photos, I'll put some more on my flickr page.

Siobhan-
Fantastic musician Adam Woodall from Vancouver-




Clare-

More inauguration photos!

Finally made time to go through the hundreds of photos I took in DC. I'll post a few here but to see the entire gallery (with captions) you'll need to click here. I HIGHLY recommend a visit to our nation's capitol, it is a beautiful city and the art/architecture/history is amazing. I was often moved to tears when experiencing the places I had only read about in history books.


This is detail shot of an "Obama Bus" that was actually a rolling retail store selling all sorts of souvenirs-



Flag with the Lincoln Memorial in the background. I had to shoot many frames to get this shot, I was about 75 feet away-



This man was praying for the new President and the new administration. One of the things that surprised me was the tone of the crowd, it definitely wasn't the "party" I expected, people were happy but also very solemn and sincere-



I had pre-visualized this shot having seen photos of the Lincoln Memorial online and on TV. All of these people were just listening on the loudspeakers, there was no jumbotron and they were 1.9 miles from the actual event!-



Washington Monument in infrared-



When people were leaving the wind picked up quite a bit and a dust storm ensued. You can see the throngs of freezing people flowing down from the Washington Monument here amidst the dust. To the left you can just see the top of the Capitol building poking up, it is about 1 1/2 miles away. The Washington Monument is quite massive, I suppose you need to see it in person to understand this, most of the photos I've seen make it look so small and thin-



The next day we went to the Capitol building and watched the Senate in action. Afterward we walked around and I was able to take a few quick pictures as the sun was setting (infrared)-



As expected, visiting the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial was an incredible experience. We went at night (after midnight) and the dim lights made it feel a little eerie. I didn't realize that it was designed to line up with the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, amazing. This is looking toward the monument.... seeing about 60,000 names on the wall was really overwhelming-