Most of the time when one of the photography professors decides to do a demo on how to shoot in the studio, it is 100% boring-as-can-be. The prof usually shoots, one of the students generally models. Everyone else gets to stand there and wait until the demo is over.
That's not quite how Jess does things.
Jess Vogelsang (who we've heard about before here) brings teaching photography to a whole new level.
He brought in a bunch of his personal lighting equipment and set it up before the students arrived for class. He arranged to have a hair/makeup artist work on a model for three hours before the shoot.
When all 33 of the students showed up for class, each of the us got at least 50 frames shooting with the pocketwizard or Jess' own camera, using a six-light setup. It was my first experience using big professional strobes, and my first time using more than three lights. I think six lights may have been a little excessive, but my style is much more contrasty and moody than the look we were going for with this shoot. I hear in the future we'll be doing more dramatic lighting setups.
We cranked up the music (Britney Spears channel on Pandora, at the model's request) and had a blast sitting around, talking with one-another and photographing a model who (we hear) is about to be signed to a big agency in Phoenix.
I got a few decent shots - but most of us are going to have very similar photos. To show you what it was really like, I took a video on my Blackberry. The quality is miserable, but I think it gets the idea across.
I'm off to spend today photographing the NAU Track meet, then Men's Basketball.
