Last week I got to attend a record breaking seminar hosted by the world renowned photographer Joe Mcnally. Apparently it was a record crowd, about 700 people. To me, that's about 650 people too much but i'll get back into that later. The seminar was hosted at the South San Francisco Convention Center.
Joe is an excellent speaker. He inspires you to create and get better. His images are breathtaking. If you are a Nikon shooter you can see a master of CLS and speedlights. In between shoots Joe has great stories and a decent stand up act, especially with all the Canon shooters in the audience.
Now back to seminar being 650 people too big. Now Joe is a great speaker, but not that good a teacher. He has 30 years of photographic experience and it shows. He can quickly take an area and match it well with his subjects. Unfortunately, he tells his assistants to move this and that " a little to the left or a little to the right" Joe rarely uses technical terms so its really hard to grasp what hes doing or how to replicate it. Basically he takes what he has learned over the years and applies it on a trial and error basis. While it takes a master 10 minutes to figure out , I bet it would take a person learning an hour or more.
Now the technical info that is provided is very basic. If you didn't have a chance to attend the seminar, you can buy the Creative Lighting System DVD by Nikon, its basically the same thing. I would have preferred a classroom instead of conference room. I would have loved to get some hands on training. Something like an assignment on how to light something. We as the students try to do it and then Joe would guide us along the way. Learning by doing is so much more enriching than just watching all day long.
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