The Lancaster Lens photography exhibit is going on right now at the Lancaster Museum of Art. I'm one of the featured artists there showing 6 of my toy images.

It's an incredible opportunity for me, and I still can't quite believe I have working showing in a museum, so stop by and support photography and the arts in Lancaster, PA.

This First Friday, I have 2 places to be at once, so instead I'm splitting my night:

• 5pm–8pm: I'll be showing some fine-art work, framed and ready to buy at Mulberry Art Studios with the rest of the Lancaster Camera Club.
• 8pm–whenever:I expect to head up to Smith LaVia (329 N Queen St) to shoot holiday images or whatever comes around and just hang out with friends.

Hopefully, I'll see everyone at Mulberry and/or at Smith LaVia. Lancaster City is a great place, and there's lots to see every First Friday.

Smith LaVia studio will have their grand opening on October's First Friday in Lancaster! I'm one of the resident photographers, so I'll be showing some work and hanging out for the night along with the 4 other photographers (and a painter). It's sure to be a good time, so stop by and say "Hello".

The studio is located at:

Suite 210
329 N Queen St
Lancaster, PA
Map

I'll be using the studio to show work, to shoot, and to host workshops.

As the local Peter Parker, I got to photograph the recent meeting of the household superheroes.

Camille and John will be getting married next year. As they've only been engaged less than a month, they've not set a date yet.

One rainy Sunday in May, Dustin, his family, and I hurried down to Lock 12 in York County to get some last-minute senior portraits even as it rained. The rain stopped when we got there, and the overcast skies treated us well for a two-hour portrait session around the lock and the creek trail above the lock.

Briana's interested in studying photography, so she volunteered to hold the lights most the time, and I even held the lights for her for a shot or two — you can see one of her shots at the end of the whole gallery.

I cycled through my normal lighting modifiers for the shoot, like the umbrella and the grid spot, but my favorite for the shoot was the little Fotodiox 8"x12" softbox. It was small and light, so it could be stuck on the end of the monopod and placed close anywhere in a scene. It's smaller size cast a more masculine hard light than my larger modifiers.

I like to enjoy many events with a camera in hand. When my brother and new sister-in-law, Matt and Jenn, asked me to photograph their wedding in the summer, I was very happy to do my part.

The rest of the photos are in the gallery, and they have been....for months.

For the Photo Arts class at Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, I was working on a portrait project. I was making images of people and their machines -- in particular, people enthusiastic about their machines. That's where Mike enters the plan.

From the moment I thought of Mike and his bicycles, I saw him surrounded by them in his garage, so that's the image we set out to make.

Mike went about rolling bicycle after bicycle into the garage, and I found anything I could to prop them up and we eventually began suspending them from the ceiling at different levels using straps, cord, and rope. Some bikes are even lashed to others to keep them facing the right directions. We added his Park toolbox as a perch, then dropped the recumbent bike into the front of the scene. We had bikes top to bottom, and Mike neatly nestled among them.

Next I had to light the scene to accent the key parts. I worked from the back to the front building the lighting. To let the way background drop dark, we turned off the garage lights and worked by the light from the sky.

I dropped the 28-inch Westcott Apollo softbox half-way back into the scene and to the left. I pointed it at the background of bicycles, and found 1/8 power on the YN-460II to be enough to light the bikes. I used the softbox back there, so I could easily keep that background light from spilling into the foreground.

To light the foreground, that's Mike and the recumbent, I popped up another YN-460II shot through a white umbrella on the right side of the scene. 1/16 power was enough there to balance him with the background lighting.

I framed it up with the camera on the tripod, and Mike shifted through a couple comfortable poses, and finally we had the image that I wanted.

Once that was out of the way, Mike had a couple ideas of what he thought would make a good photo. For his stuff, I just lit it with the 2 strobes—the one in front of him in the softbox, and both at about 45 degrees for basic coverage.

I had a serious photography job coming up, my brother's wedding, and I started to realize how much more reliable my lighting kit could be. I had 2 CTR-301 radio receivers and only 1 transmitter. If anything happened to that transmitter, I'd be stuck triggering optically or just shooting natural light.

I also only had 3 old Sunpak 4xx strobes, and I had already replaced one that had failed about a year ago. Sometimes the battery doors jiggled loose, I had broken one foot already, and sometimes they fired full-power even though it was set for less.

It was time to spend a little money on some new and some backup gear. I hit eBay and ordered 2 more YongNuo CTR-301P receivers, another transmitter, and 2 shiny new YN-460MkII strobes.

The radio trigger set tested out fine -- working through walls and across the house, and they inter-operated with my old CTR-301 triggers which have been serving me well for over a year. Once they looked good, I removed the batteries, and boxed them back up for backup.

The 2 strobes were a bit more exciting. I threw some random alkalines into it that were too weak to recycle my Sunpak 433, and it powered right up and I was seeing reasonable recycle times. It's good to know that it'll not be finicky about its batteries. With relatively fresh NiMH batteries, it's still recycling within about 10 seconds from a full-power pop. I had the strobes figured out and tested within about 3 minutes of opening the packaging.

Upon inspecting the user's manual a bit, I realized that these things could be fine-tuned more by pressing MODE and PILOT together, then I could adjust the EV up and down from the original setting in 1/7 stop increments. Nice...not that I'm used to having that level of control.

The S1 slave mode is esay and seems to work nicely enough triggering off bounced light in a small room. The whole thing is dead simple, since it only works with manual power settings -- it's the cheapest new strobe a Strobist could want, I think.

For my final tests, I took them outside, put them on the CTR-301's on stands, and played a bit with my shoot-through umbrella and this tiny flash-mounted softbox I had also bought. In the hand, these strobes feel like their made of thick-enough plastic, and the hotshoe's about as solid as plastic can be and still be thin enough to fit in a hotshoe socket.

I'm pleased so far, and hopefully, they'll hold up as well as my YongNuo CTR-301's are, and I'll still be saying good things about them in a couple years.

Braden brought a couple of his trucks out to the sand court for his four-year photos, and we sat and played a bit while I shot. He also ran in circles a bit to get his mother a bit wound up, but we were still doing fine -- I only needed a few good shots, and I managed plenty.

From my gear bag, I used the small satin umbrella to bounce the strobe onto the scene, often crossing the sun which dappled into our mostly-shaded scene. For Braden, I also packed a bonus toy -- a real folding shovel, so we could do some real digging. This provided a good change of pace, and it was the perfect height to aid in posing his hands when he was seated on a truck.