A friend of a friend works for a company, and he asked my friend if he could shoot some photos of a snowboarding expo after party sorta "red carpet" style at a bar. So naturally my friend said he would, and somehow roped me into helping him.

First off, I've never been to a bar. Seriously. The closest I've gotten was sitting at the bar at Outback one night since to get a table was a 2 hour wait. Secondly, I had been shooting soccer all day since getting up at 5am, and the shoot was from about 9:30pm-midnight. Loooooong day.

So we showed up with a couple strobes, stands, umbrellas, not knowing anything about the place, and after some quick setup & testing we went with 1 strobe camera left as main, triggered by on camera flash acting as a fill light. The optical slaving wasn't too bad, since there wasn't that many other cameras there. Now that I think about it, I wish I had gotten a photo of the setup.

These were our helpers. They'd go get people to take photos with, and we just got to hang out, shoot whoever came by, and ate whatever food we wanted, since it was all on the house


I wish we could have gotten people farther away from the backdrop, but due to where we had to setup, no such luck


Still though, we got some great images while out there


This group kept hangin out around us. The guy in the middle is actually the company owner


He wanted a jump shot, and I wish he wasn't wearing a white shirt! This was taken with my 12-24 @12mm, and there is a table to the left side of the photo, just outside. That shows the room we had to work with.


The good thing overall was my friend's company was expecting 2 guys with P&S cameras & on camera flashes to show up, not 2 guys with SLR's, studio strobes, PWs, and everything. They were impressed with out setup & how professional we were that they're probably going to have us shoot more with them, paid this time.

And since I'm more a of sports shooter, I found out they help produce snowboarding videos