Canon connect event February 7th 2011

On February 7th Canon was organizing a dealer event “Canon connect” in which they presented the new products for the press and in the evening also for their dealers. Because I’m working together with Canon for our upcoming small flash workshops they asked me if I could show some setups with the 430EXII flashes during this event, and of course I did jump at this opportunity. Seeing some new gear and meeting up with the guys from Canon is always a blast. The event was well organized as you might expect from Canon and as you can see in the video they made some killer cocktails, add the fact I can play around with some lights and you know I loved to do this.

For the demos I kept it really simple to show that you really don’t need much.
Our model for the night was Norine and with her as a model it’s of course easy to make some nice looking images 😀
For the demo I started out with just one 430EXII on the model and the gray background to show how you can control light on both the background and the model. After this I moved the model more forward and showed the difference on the wall. After this I added a diffusion panel to show the difference between that and the bare strobe, of course I also showed the difference in moving the diffusion material closer to the model and closer to the strobe, the reaction is always fun to see, a lot of people expect that a diffuser in front of the strobe gives you a softbox effect, it’s nice to send those people home with the knowledge that the diffusion really has to be further away from the strobe, that way the lightsource gets bigger and the light quality softer. Also by moving it closer to the model the lightfall off is quicker what can give you great effects.

After this I added the second strobe and explained the ratios between the A and B channels. Because it had to be quick workshops I stopped there but luckily there were a lot of questions after the demos so I could keep talking about the lightsetups and gear 😀

As you can see in the video and the shot at the opening of this blog post we also played with putting the diffusion behind the model and using the flash exposure compensation blowing out the background creating a nice wrap arround effect. This was a very populair setup because people kept asking me if it really was just one strobe and they kept going to the monitor to see what was coming in.

Demoing for non photographers is always a bit more challenging than for our photographing colleagues but it’s not less fun and to be honest I love to explain the most common mistakes that a lot of shop personal makes and give tips how to tackle the problems for the customers, and seeing the reactions I hope that they will also use it in the store by their next sales pitch or problem solving for a customer. For us photographers it’s often very easy to solve those problems but people working in a store are often not working with the strobes the way we do and explaining something like setting the flash exposure compensation to a customer can be troubling, by showing them live what’s going on it cleared up a lot of questions (I hope)…..

During the demo Annewiek and Wendy assisted me and both did the filming for the next video. The editing was done by Dilani who is my new intern for the coming months, so this is her first work you are seeing.

To order the gear I use surf to the discount pages on this website or :

To see what I recommend for lighting visit :
Frank Doorhof lighting gear

Click on the next link for the digital darkroom :
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And finally the camera gear I recommend :
Camera gear