The Portrait SIG’s Trampoline Shoot on Wednesday 14 September 2022

Alan Edwards and Steve Buesden arranged an excellent event at the Methodist Church Hall in Wokingham for a total of six Bracknell Camera Club  members.  This was not a simple exercise since, in addition to the usual booking of a room and model, they had to do a lot of research to work out starting settings to use high speed synch flash to capture the very fast moving model.

To add to the challenge the original model cancelled in the morning and Steve had to do much leg work to find the excellent Zara from Farnborough who turned out to be a brilliant substitute and fortunately was fit enough for what was a very exhausting session.  She also brought some great outfits.

As you can see the venue was ideal with a very high ceiling.  What may not be obvious is that in the 3.5 hours we had to set up the soft box and multiple light systems and construct the trampoline from scratch – and then take everything down and load it back into the vehicles – no wonder we needed a drink afterwards.  As you may have seen from Gladys, folding a 8ft by 7ft “instant” softbox was almost beyond us!!

Five of us (Steve, Alan, Bob Freeman, Gladys Perrier and I) were using various cameras while Jeff Lawrence was using the iPhone for both video and stills.  Amazingly, despite the use of four different camera makes, the lighting set up had been carefully designed to trigger based on the flash from each camera and so there were no delays from having to transfer triggers and get them to work on different camera bodies. Since we had all (just about!) figured out how to use HSS on our cameras the process went surprisingly smoothly.

What made this a particularly interesting evening for me was that, as a group, we learned how best to time our shots as we went on such that in the later stages we were all getting good sequences of “keepers” and not totally exhausting the model.  You can see everyone here “chimping” during the learning phases.

At the end, while the dismantling process started, there was a chance to take some straight portrait shots – here you can see Steve agreeing a shot with Zara.

There may be a repeat of this event if there is sufficient interest and it turns out that Zara also had some ideas for another type of “activity”, a hoop shoot.  Thanks again to Alan and Steve for all the hard work to set this up.  If you are a member of the Bracknell Camera Club  interested in joining the Portrait SIG then please contact Alan Edwards. the leader of the Portrait SIG.

Paul Hendley

Below are some of the “official” output shots.