Chase Jarvis is an inspirational photographer. He makes phenomenal images. But more important, he shares his knowledge with aspiring photographers. Really shares it. Just look at the video below. (Here's his blog post.)

Joe McNally has to be one of the best Nikon photographers on the planet.

On the Strobist blog, I saw the following video of a shoot Joe ran in the Dubai desert. The Strobist's post is very entertaining -- I think David actually shot the video with a Canon G9 -- so go ahead and read it for details about the shoot itself.

However, it's the video that is truly wild. At one point, Joe has 7 SB-800 flashes firing at once from a single stand. It looks like a giant flash lollipop!

It's fun to play with light. Earlier this evening, I shot some self portraits with a single, restricted light source -- a snooted SB-800 strobe on a light stand to camera left.

I was participating in a Strobist "Film Noir" lighting assignment. If you are interested in lighting, I highly recommend checking out the Strobist blog. I've learned a lot there.

Hope you enjoy the photos. Not sure which I like the best. Any thoughts?

I had the wonderful opportunity last weekend to attend a meetup with NJ-based strobists.

For those who don't know, there's large and growing Strobist group on Flickr (16,000+) of photographers who use off-camera flash lighting to enhance their images. This inspiration for all this is the Strobist blog. (The two fashion shoots I recently posted were both done using these techniques.)

The NJ-based strobists met Saturday morning at the headquarters of Dyna-Lite in Union, NJ. We got to play with their big studio lights -- including a huge softbox and beauty dish -- and learn from each other. Here's a back-of-the-room view:

I've been working with lighting a lot lately, and have tried to get the flash off my camera at every opportunity. It's not always easy to set up a light stand, though.

So, I grabbed this technique, which I saw first on the Strobist blog. And it works really, really well. Had to model it myself...

Technorati Tags: flash, self-portrait, strobist