This is one of the first shots I took at Deer Lake, a place where I normally might spend a few hours just by myself hoping to capture an elusive cooper's hawk on the fly. This time it was part of a large Vancouver Strobist meet with several photographers and models. As I detailed earlier, it was nearly rained out but after the thunderstorm passed -- beautiful. As you can see here, nice spot with even more dramatic skyline thanks to that storm.

For this shot we were basically shooting the B800 at full power trying to overpower the suddenly bright sky. The sun itself was still behind clouds but was burning through. Without the B800 we probably still had the strobes to do it -- indeed, I nearly didn't get the B800 in play after forgetting how the softbox worked (I reverted to the beauty dish again). In the eight minutes it took me to get the Alien Bee going, Ian had already set up his two flashes and was looking at his watch waiting for me to get going.

Other groups were doing their thing in and about this wonderful location which provided not just the pastoral scene above but also -- strangely enough -- provided one group with their chance to do a studio shot in the woods. Yes, I wondered about that too. All this way out into a nice park and they pull off nice studio lighting by putting Valerie below against a construction trailer.

That's okay, later Valerie changed to outside wear again and fit nicely into the laid back atmosphere by posing for us against some rocks. Just to show you that I don't bring out the monolight for everything, that second shot was taken without any kind of artificial lighting at all. It also shows you how nice this 'consumer' lens: the Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 can be. Nice bokeh, right?