Last weekend Jason Lykins and Shad Ramsey of Red Door Photography just outside of Cincinnati hosted a Strobist Meet-up at their large studio.  If you’re in the Cincinnati area, you should check them out.  The do wonderful work and they support the photography community with regular classes for photographers and models.

For this meet-up, I helped by hosting the sign-up forms for photographers and models here on LightandPixels.com.  We had a good turn out of photographers and models.   The theme of the Strobist Meet-up was “Sports”.  As the frequent readers of this blog know, I love sports-portraits or “Sportraits”.  It give me a chance to provide an athlete a special expression of their effort.

The meet-up had a six separate setups that each photographer could spend time shooting in.  One “advanced” photographer would setup a shot and the others would stop by and learn about the shot and then shoot.  The result was an opportunity for each photographer to walk away with some great shots and learn a little something about lighting they may not have know.  This meet-up was also loaded with studio gear so that gave a lot of people a first try with big lights.

I setup two different shots.  The first was two SB800 as rims in gridded strip boxes with a WL1600 with 20 degree grid for targeted fill at face.  The lights were fired with Radiopopper JrX studio triggers.

Here is the result.

And another result:

And here is the setup diagram courtesy of  the Lighting Essentials website.  The grid lights are set at F5.6 and the gridded face fill light is set to F2.8.   One thing this setup requires is that you watch the shadow from the gridded fill light in front.  The light is on low power but it still cuts a nice sharp shadow on the back wall to the right.  The shadow can look cool, but you also may not want it in the picture.  In the case of the two shots above I was trying to keep it out of the shot so notice the location of the camera if you get any closer to the center flash you get the shadow.  I also like the angle the subject is presented in the setup below.

Take a moment and check out this Flickr link for more shots from all the wonderful photographers in the Ohio Strobist group.