Back in January, David (The Strobist) Hobby and Joe (Numnuts) McNally announced their Flash Bus 2011 Tour – a six-week, 29-city bus tour around the US teaching their small flash lighting philosophies. David takes a manual approach (in the main) while Joe usually takes the TTL route. On March 26 the tour bus pitched up in Houston and about 300 photo enthusiasts lined up outside the Ayva Center in high anticipation of the day to come.
A glance at the tour's twitter stream early in the morning foretold of interesting times ahead. There was a desperate plea for Audio-Visual rental contacts.
In the lobby of the Ayva Center, the 10:00 am opening was approaching but things appeared tense and there was an announcement of a slight delay on opening. It was about 15 minutes after the hour when the doors opened and they started allowing people in.
The Ayva Center is mot usually used for wedding receptions and other such social occasions. When David came on stage he commented on the challenges of booking venues from over a thousand miles away. The crew and the VALs had removed the white seat covers and removed much of the decoration but white sheer scarfs still draped the ceiling. In keeping with the theme of the venue and maintaining the fun the team have clearly been having on the tour, Joe entered with a scarf draped over his head like a veil.
In addition to the challenges with the venue, the team were challenged by a very noisy air conditioner and a problematic sound system that echoed, distorted and fed back throughout the day. Despite these challenges the pair soldiered on an, for me at least, these challenges failed to detract from a fantastic day of learning. At one of the breaks I felt compelled to comment to Joe that Houston had once again thrown him a curved ball in terms of location – his last teaching stint in the city having been held at the auditorium of the Houston Zoo!
David kicked off the morning leading us through his ‘Lighting in Layers' approach.
David's approach was to take the audience step-by-step through a series of images illustrating how he had built each image, starting with the ambient, then adding fill, key and accent to build the final image. I was particularly taken by his ability to stop mid-stream and answer a raft of questions called out from the floor. He also critiqued each of the images he presented with what he could do better / different next time, illustrating well that it's the journey that matters, not the destination.
For the afternoon session, Joe took the audience through a series of TTL set-ups, live on stage with his assistants and various audience members serving as models.
Joe's not afraid to show when things don't work out as he expected them to. This adds to the allure of his teaching – that photography is an art and the technology will let you down, but don't let that stop you from experimenting to get the shot you want. As with David's session in the morning, Joe showed how to take a room that wasn't particularly attractive, render it black (without turning out the lights), then build an image by adding and shaping lights to craft an image. As Syl Arena says in his LIDLIPS #6, “Photography enables us to see beyond the limitations of human vision.”
It seems as though at every venue the bus stops, Joe is challenged to drive more and more Nikon Speedlights from his commander. Two days earlier, in Dallas, he'd hit 60. Here in Houston the crew stopped counting at 80![ad name=”post”]
At the end of the show, David and Joe sat on stage together and took general questions from the audience on a range of topics including their views on the business side of photography and how the internet has changed and will continue to change photography. It was towards the end of this session when one of the funniest moments of the day occurred. The crew had a 16Gb Lexar CF card to give away so Joe called for anyone who had a film camera with them to hold it up and the first one to hold up the camera would get the card. A young lady raised a film camera up in the air. When Joe inquired as to whether she used CF cards (or SD), she replied that she didn't have a digital camera, she used film!
If the Flash Bus 2011 Tour hasn't yet hit your city and if there are still slots available, I highly recommend you take the day off from your regular cycles and spend it with David and Joe. They both present openly as peers, not only of each other but of the audience members also, irrespective of their ability. During one of the breaks, for example, David spend a few minutes with one gentleman showing him how to use the pop-up flash on his camera as both a fill and as a commander to the gent's SB700 as a key, taking time to ensure the gent understood what David was driving the camera and the Speedlights to do. During the breaks both Joe and Dave were very approachable and despite (perhaps becuase?) of the venue they both maintained their good humor throughout the day.
