San Francisco Strobist style meet

First, I want to say thanks again to Mike Wong, fashion photographer and portrait victim above, for hosting this great event at his new studio here in Fremont, California. After last week's Strobist seminar, I was very excited to meet with a group of photographically minded individuals for a day of talking cameras, lenses, lighting, photo business, and of course, doing some shooting. More after the jump.

As our group has normally been much more Landscape and Nature oriented, we got off to a bit of a slow start, with a lot more talk than action (yes Pradipta, I stole that one) but after a bit the cameras and lights started coming out, and the fun began. Many of us were shooting using Nikon's CLS, both with pop-up flashes and SU-800's, and a few were running Pocket Wizards. One set of the tiny and versatile Elinchrom Skyports also made a brief appearance, courtesy of Kent Johnson, from across the bay.

Probably my favorite victim subject of the afternoon was a gentleman by the name of Oscar Rico, who was kind enough to stand exactly in front of the background and between a few lights while we had an extensive discussion of flash metering and ambient balancing. This is fortunate, because had I been standing in front of the camera (and the lights) the images would not have looked nearly as nice. Thank you Oscar. And your portrait looks wonderful, if I may be so bold. I wish I had not been using quite so strong a background gel, because I can't entirely get rid of a bit of green on your shoulder.

All in all, a great afternoon (even though I missed the food run) and we've definitely got to do this again sometime soon. I look forward to meeting with the Flickr based Bay Area group as well, there's not much overlap of membership as yet, but I think we can build off each other and make this a fantastic community. Seattle, watch your back!