• Photomarketing consultancy ST&A claims UK event photographers may be turning to 8″x10″ and 10″x12″ instant prints to recover falling print revenues.
  +
• David Hobby, the American off-camera-flash blogger known as “Strobist”, spends a day teaching for The Flash Centre in London UK.
  +
• The new “London Road” studio in Gloucestershire marks it’s official opening with an open day of models and motorbikes.
  +

Saturday, 22 May 2010

• The twitterverse wakes up to photo lab Photographique’s “Bristol Festival of Photography”!
  +
• Photography trainer Damien Lovegrove appeals for exemplars of beauty, vintage, boudoir or latex photography to study!
  +
• Photo model Lex Eleven issues a tentative travel notice for Berlin, “soon”.
  +
• Gary Fong posts a YouTube video of gels for his Light Sphere flash gun diffuser.
  +
• The Sygma photo agency shuts down.

Friday, 21 May 2010

• David Hobby has his first engagement on the Strobist tour of Britain.
  +
• Norfolk wedding photographer Antonella Muscat reveals her rock’n'roll wedding will feature on “Four Weddings” on June 21.
  +
• Photographer Jonathan Worth announces the accession of his portrait of British comic-book author Alan Moore to the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery.
  +

Thursday, 20 May 2010

• Mark from Hasselblad UK visits commercial photographer Jay McGlaughlin in his studio.
  +
• Photomarketing consultancy ST&A claims debs photography is developing in the UK, and that the crews cleaning up have come in from event photography, not from schools photography.
  +
• Peter Galassi converses with Gerry Badger at the National Portrait Gallery about photographer Henri Cartier Bresson.
  +
• Business Start-Up expo is on at Excel, London. Quite a few photographers attend.
  +

Wednesday, 19 May 2010

• The overhauled BAPLA Picture Buyers’ Fair concludes at its new venue, The Barbican in London. Few photographers have attended.
  +
• Kiss and Tell: Bankrupt celebrity photographers Markus Klinko & Indrani claim to the New York Post that Indrani is seeing Lindsay Lohan!
  +
• David “Strobist” Hobby shoots Domestic Sluttery blogger Sian Meades in London, on a catamaran and in a driverless train.
  +
• The BIPP North West holds its AGM.
  +
• Wedding photographer Julia Boggio comes home (eventually!) with a “highly commended” from the HSBC South London Entrepreneur of the Year awards.
  +
• Italian photographer Fabio Polenghi is shot and killed in the Thai street clashes.
  +

Tuesday, 18 May 2010

• Photographer Craig Fraser brings home his new son, Oscar James.
  +

Monday, 17 May 2010

• Nothing much happened.
  +

Once you have your flash, the question is how to better use it.

Briefly, your decisions are:

• Where am I going to put the light – and why?
• How am I going to get it to stay there?
• How am I going to trigger it?
• What will the quality of the light be: Hard or soft?
• What will the beam spread of the light be – wide, narrow?
• How will I balance the strobe’s intensity with the ambient light?
• How will I balance the strobe’s color with the ambient light?

There you go. Seven decisions you get to make, with an infinite number of possibilities. And that is just assuming one strobe as a light source. Very soon, most of these variables will get to be instinctive, and you can concentrate on the two or three that will define the quality of light in your photo.

The Strobist “Lighting 101” blog thread is probably the best place to start when you first decide to move your flash off-camera. And it’s not a bad place to start learning about lighting in general. Really very highly recommended.