Being a new business photographer, especially a new professional (vs amateur) photographer starting out in London .. it can be nerve wracking! I’ve had this dream and desire for many years to own my own business and make my own living. While I’m still fully employed in a day job, I know I’m starting with a good foundation.

Part of this foundation was to gain some more confidence in my skills. My work, photographs and designs speak for themselves but I needed to be sure in myself that I knew what I was talking about and how I can improve with my lighting skills. The thing I wasn’t so confident about was how to get a great shot within 5 minutes of getting an idea, setting up for the shot and grabbing it in my magic camera lens! Because, of course .. my camera is magic within my hands and no one has a bad picture in the end. It’s all about confidence, in myself and in the beauty and charisma of others being themselves in the moment.

Meet Studio Time’s – Speed light photography course teacher Brian Hillsden, who taught our class near London Fields train station and their gorgeous model of the day: Sofia Skvortsova. For the first part we learned about our cameras, our flashes and what gaps we have our knowledge. I started off with a bit of a hiccup scenario .. I’d forgotten the fact that while I’d been playing around with my camera the night before and had manually turned the on camera flash compensation to -3, its lowest power.. I had not turned it back. It took Brian reminding me to set all compensations back to zero to get my flash balancing correctly like everyone else. Woops!

After that though things went a lot better and I soon felt my confidence return. I learned about how an 18% grey card also works for exposure settings as well as for white balance .. who knew! I learned that the less distance a properly exposed speed light is to the subject the softer the wrap around lighting .. I always thought the opposite, but I now know that a bare exposure flash from a speed light can yield amazingly soft shadows. I would never have believed .. my proof was in the pudding before me in previous experience. It took doing a class to teach me otherwise and I was READY to learn.

I’ve specialised more in the dramatic lighting, normally found in theatre work as I like to play act being characters other than myself. Yes I’m interesting but I live with myself 365days a year and I need something to play at to learn something more about myself and to push further in my skills. So I thought I knew how to soften a speed lights harsh edges. Uhuh .. riiiiight. I admit it, I was wrong in what I thought I knew and now I know different .. I’m free to improve in another grand leap. Just wait and see.

So for fledgling efforts in redoing what I know about speed light, Sofia stepped up to the hot seat and let us all practise our new lighting skills on her. Miss @SofiaSkvortsova deserves a medal, despite a cold and feeling under the weather she was a star. Smiling out our geeky humour in the class, our sudden bouts of nerves when things did NOT work as we expected and got flustered. She was perfectly graceful and understanding.

So the challenge for me was to find a more subtle and gentle light from speed lights that have not been diffused by gauze, soft boxes or filters. We, of course, did use a soft box but the great surprise for me was bouncing light from a faux wall (made from polystyrene) and also from a home made beauty dish. Which gives me hope of being able to build a replica myself!

One of the really suave comments that I said, just because I thought it so I said it kinda thing, is that Sofia has the clearest whitest eyes I’ve ever seen. Really, truly .. I’ve never seen eyes like hers that are so white. Especially not a person with a cold to boot. I admit to cringing internally the minute I said it but there we go. I’m a goof ball, very cool and collected with the compliments. Yeah. So no I have not dodged, lightened or done anything to her eyes apart from a slight sharpen action to bring out more details.

Anyway. The biggest thing that I learned to do that day was to use my light meter in conjunction with my speed lights. I knew it would revolutionise things for me and I’ve had my big Oprah style ‘Aha’ moment .. yes, Oprah dear I know you trademarked that but we all still say we have aha moments. I now know exactly how to set for the ambient light I want in the background and how to tweak the speed lights to perfectly expose my subject with the f.stop giving my much loved narrow depth of field. This is a very big *happy sigh* moment right there and I think this next photo says it perfectly. Its everything I wanted to achieve from the day: soft, v. narrow depth of field focus and a feeling of natural light from a flash!

To wrap up the day I tried two experimental lenses, one was mine and one was Brians. Mine is a lensbaby 2.0, it allows me to bend the sweet focal spot in the photo to exactly where I want it .. well, it takes a bit of guess work and effort when shooting at f.1.0 but still .. practise makes perfect and this was my best experimental shot. The lens that I truly want to steal from Brian is the Defocusing Lens that he has. It is such a soft dreamy focus on the lens but also manages to have absolute pin clarity in details. How it manages to do that I do not know but .. it does! You can see that with the photo of my classmate Anna on the right. Forgive me Anna!

There we have it .. new confidences, new friends, new models, networking and skills to round out the day. Plus I found a new sometin’ sometin’ to coveat .. a defocusing lens which costs the earth!

Thanks to all who took part in that day and to helping me get closer to one of my photography goals: being able to set up within 5 minutes and get a perfect exposure. All I need now is practise, practise and practise. So who wants to model for me?