At the very end of January I had the incredible honor of being asked by Phottix and the PhotoVideoEDU group to do a workshop at their EDU Expo hosted by Roberts Camera.  It was an incredible event that consisted of some incredibly talented photographers and videographers from around the United States who are full time Photography Educators as well as photographers as part of the UPAA (University Photographers Association of America).  The UPAA photographers are incredible as they go from day to day shooting sporting events, to magzine portraits, to calendar shots for the athletics department.  The list goes on and on but they are an impressive group to be in front of.  More exciting than that though  were the two keynote speakers who I am incredibly fortunate to have not only met, but presented with.  Those speakers were the incredibly talented Photographers Joey Terrill and Jeff Jacobsen (who for the life of me I can’t find a website for) from the University of Kansas.  What an incredible collection of talent all put into one place, both on the presenting side, as well as the learning side. I am truly honored and humbled to have been part of this group, and in fact honestly I’m not sure how I managed to wiggle my way in there as a presenter in the first place.

That’s Drew, wearing a very ironic red shirt the day of the shoot.  We didn’t tell him to wear red, nor had I met Drew before the expo but he is a fitness model who was arranged for me by Kenneth Parks but that’s just part of the presentation.  My presentation that I’ve done a couple of times for Phottix includes getting a model I’ve never met and making as many different portraits of that person in the space I have available in the time allotted.  In this particular case, the room was the Roberts Camera classroom which is about as close to accurately described as a beige box as an actual beige box would be.

With that, I set up a black background to give myself a “safe” shot and used my Phottix Indra500 Units along with a Mitros+ Speedlight and a couple of Nikon Speedlights with Phottix ODIN receivers all in strategic locations while using the ODIN transmitter to change the powers, and turn groups on and off all from the camera in order to make as many different shots as I could..  I didn’t quite get through everything I envisioned, but in the 45 minutes I feel like the 11 portraits I took were pretty good.

As I mentioned, I had a few other ideas, but time was limited and there were questions about how I was using the Phottix Indra System with ODIN Transmitter which I was happy to answer.  That took  up a chunk of the rest of the time before cleaning up for my opportunity to listen to Joey and Jeff talk about their work.  Not only that but I got to see them teach and in action in their workshops the next day which was an incredible experience!  In fact Joey wrote about his experience being at the EDU Expo for Nikon and Profoto HERE.

Very special thanks to Drew for coming out to model, as well as Kenneth Parks who arranged it for me.  Special thanks to Roberts Camera for hosting the incredible event as well as Phottix and PhotoVideoEDU for asking me to come to play that day.  Blog has been silent for about a month after I promised to get more content up.  Lots of neat stuff coming, January was crazy busy for me so stay tuned. Things like the Nikon D5 I have on order, the Phottix ODIN 2 transmitter and receivers which is what the Pocket Wizard TT1s and TT5s SHOULD have been (I may or may not have played with some already…) and a few other neat things too.  More soon.