Mark Wallace Photo Meetup Tour

This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending the ‘Mark Wallace Photo Meetup Tour’ at Ambient Plus Studio here in Atlanta. Let me start by saying the Mark Wallace seems to be a really great guy. He was very friendly, knowledgeable, and straightforward; all traits I really appreciate in an individual. Secondly, I have to thank Pocket Wizard (PW) for putting together the tour, bringing in great talent, and footing the bill for the entire thing. The workshop, though I have little to compare it to, was easily worth at least $150 to $200, yet it was totally free. While part of the workshop was a pretty standard introduction to lighting, Mark did cover a few topics I wasn’t familiar with and did so in a very easy to understand manner (not that I need things to be easy ).

There were five stations setup in the studio, each with their own lighting configurations, models, and pre-configured Pocket Wizard Mini TT1s & Flex TT5s. Liana and I have several traditional PW transceivers and two of the new TT1s, which are used to trigger the transceivers. The form factor of the TT1s is the main reason we purchased the units. The older model PWs are a bit unwieldy when trying to mount them to the hot-shoe or via a tripod mount screw. The TT1s are very low profile when in the hot-show and since they have their own hot-shoe built into the top of the unit, you can place a 580 EX II on top of the unit for on camera bounce flash. The TT1s have had their issues, but I think PW has worked out a lot of the flaws in their latest firmware update. I’m hoping that Liana and I will be able to justify picking up a couple of the TT5 units in the near future so that we can take advantage of  ControlTL, which is only available when using the TT1s in conjunction with the TT5s. At the moment, we don’t really need the features of ControlTL, as we shoot our off camera flashes in full manual mode.

While I’ve been shooting weddings with Liana for nearly three years, I haven’t advantage of many opportunities to work with models or even our clients in a portrait setting. I don’t possess Liana’s skill in posing people for the most flattering angles and lighting. That is a skill that I am working develop, but being a fairly shy guy, I’ve found it challenging thus far. Thankfully, the models at the event were no strangers at striking poses that enabled those of us who provided little direction with some fun shots.

Below are a few of my favorite shots: