Warning: This post is geared towards fellow photographer lighting nerds.

Oh photography conferences. The speakers always show off their skills with their fancy $2,000 lenses or a $5,000-8,000 camera that makes you have gear lust. The first conference I went to had all these photographers use 1Ds Mark IIIs and 70-200mm f/2.8Ls for their portrait photography to get that bokeh. I went out and bought the Nikon version, but then after using one for a while, I thought to myself, “this thing is too darn heavy to carry everyday with me, and still really heavy to bring on shoots.” So most of the time it just sits at home, lonely and unused.

My friend Steve and I have a term for buying too much stuff: Team That Guy. “That guy” as in the dude that has way too much gear and doesn’t even use half of it. That guy who has tons of pro level gear with amateur results to show for it. That guy who constantly buys stuff to compensate for lack of skill. That guy who brings more gear to a shoot than he knows what to do with, and still comes back with really bad photos. That guy who does endless pixel peeping tests on his gear to make sure everything is perfect and only has photos of cats or brick walls to show for it. Yeah, we’ve all been there. The mindset of “if I had this piece of gear, I can totally do what David Hobby or Joe McNally does!” When we finally buy that piece of kit, we end up forgetting about everything else in our camera bag.

This is Team “That Guy” (Team TG for short), and it happens quite often.

This year’s Flash Bus Tour brings out Team TG in a different area – lighting. The famed Strobist (aka David Hobby) and Joe McNally are both huge users of small flash photography. They use these flashes to make the subject pop and manipulate light in a very interesting way. The downside for someone like me (that only owns one small hotshoe flash) is that these guys have and use a lot of them. It makes my camera bag jealous and want to buy more to match them.

The advantage to small hotshoe flashes is that they’re small and portable, but the downside is they don’t produce as much power as studio strobes. To fix that, you simply move into shade or darker environments where your flashes can overpower the ambient light. I have a studio strobe but that’s normally too big/heavy/cumbersome to bring on shoots alone. If I do decide to use it, I’d need an assistant or two to help me setup, tear down, and move from location to location otherwise it’s really slow. But now learning that these guys can take up to 30 minutes to take just a few photos at one location, I think I’m going to start trying that out. A few stellar quality photos is better than a hundred ok ones right?

Then we have modifiers. The shear amount of lightstands, boom arms, and light modifiers these guys have probably cost more than the flashes themselves; but they are very necessary in defining the shape and quality of your light. They went through each of the tools in their tool bag and did live demos on how they solve problems with making their photos. This was very enlightening – but also very gear lust inducing.

It’s very hard to avoid being “that guy” after watching their demo of how they work.

I have to hand it to them though, seeing their process and problem solving was very informational, and will definitely help me in creating better pictures. If the Flash Bus is coming to your city and it’s not sold out yet, I’d highly encourage you to go. David Hobby and Joe McNally are probably the photography industry’s best resource in terms of hot shoe lighting, and they are great instructors to boot. They were both funny, charismatic, and very generous with their knowledge.

If you guys ever read my little blog, David and Joe: THANK YOU, and you guys are welcome back to Portland anytime.