Me and another club member attended the Intro To Lighting workshop today in the Chicago store.

The workshop was $30 for 3 hours of class. The room is quite small for the amount of people, I believe they had 35-40 people in the class. They projected the power point presentation above on the front wall so everyone could see and the speaker was easily seen pretty much anywhere in the room.

They covered all the basics of lighting (color of light, direction of light, quality of light, quantity of light, and ratio of light). Talked about the correlation between shutter speeds and f-stops. Big emphasis on metering your shot and not relying on the in camera meter since it is metering reflective lighting vs incident (incident is measuring the light falling on the subject).

Alot of the later parts were talking about the different equipment and what it does to the light - reflectors / diffusers / snoots / grids / unbrellas / softboxes. Then we did a quick touch on different types of lighting - side lighting / rembrant lighting / loop lighting / butterfly lighting. Then learned how to take advantage of broad lighting and short lighting.

Overall I enjoyed the workshop. He went slow and answered all the questions that came up. We were a bit rushed towards the end due to all the questions. I learned alot and seen alot of cool stuff in the different equipment available to do different things with your lights.

The way it sounds the 2nd class - Discovering Portrait Photography is more hands on and goes more into styles of lighting and the set-up that goes into it. It is definately a class I am going to attend but I would strongly suggest that anyone that has zero or very limited knowledge of lighting that they attend this class that we did today.

If you go to Calumetphoto.com and click on events they list all the workshops they have at each store. It looks that they repeat their most popular classes every month.

For $30 for 3 hours of instruction, I don't think that can be beat. If you are near a calumet photo and have a few hours to learn something and get some questions answered give it a go I don't think you will be disappointed. :thumbsup: