Red Carpet Treatment and a Ring Flash Shooting Technique

Hello Everyone!

If you haven't already checked it out, take a look at how you can enter to win Adobe Creative Suite 4.  There has been a tremendous response so far (after only a day) and I'm super excited for all my new followers!  Hopefully there will be something on this blog that you'll enjoy and maybe even learn from. 

So with that I thought I'd share two things you might want to try out at your next event.  Here's some background, one of my clients threw an amazing 40th birthday party.  Like, THE PARTY of the decade.  You can check out the slideshow on an earlier blog post.  Seriously, if you haven't checked it out go do it now.  This party was insane! 

Anyway, I had this idea to literally roll out the red carpet for her guests as they drove up to the valet.  Because the theme of the party was a movie star extravaganza, I thought it would be fun to also put up one of those billboards behind the red carpet you see at movie premiers and what not.

Here you can see a shot of one of the couples walking down the red carpet



As people walked down the red carpet, I was blessed to have some AMAZING shooters with me who flashed away to their hearts content to give a paparazzi-like feel.  Gotta give a quick shout-out to them!  Evan Bishop, Betsy Tomasello, and Kevin Mudd. 

Everyone LOVED the whole red carpet thing and say they all felt like movie stars!  How cool!!  At the end of the red carpet I setup a ring flash where I took portraits of people as they came by. Here's an awesomely dorky shot of me behind the camera:




And here's how the shots turn ou:




So if you ever need to fancy up an event, try rollout the red carpet for them!

OK, now's where things got interesting.  While standing around dialing my lights in I took a quick shot through the ring flash but without pushing the camera all the way through:




I thought how cool would this be to shoot through!?!  So I asked Kevin to take a quick shot and here's what we got:




Well, I just thought this was the coolest thing ever!!!  I still think Evan and Kevin's twiter avatars are from when we were messing around shooting this :)