Workshop Review by Ron Vachon

Lighting that sells

Sonia Ahmad presented a lighting workshop in her home studio.  Her studio is very well laid-out in her garage.  She has customized it with plenty of storage for her gear and it is even air conditioned.  I was very impressed how organized it is and that even with that amount of gear, she and her husband can park their cars when she moves her light stands out of the way.

We started with a short overview of the day and a lecture about the fundamentals controlling the light, where to put your light in relationship to the subject and which modifiers she recommends that we use for the lighting styles she demonstrated.  She showed us 3 variations of one, two and three light setups.  We had a model come in the afternoon and we took turns photographing.  She even gave us handouts of each setup so we can reference it later.

Sonia uses here light meter extensively and she showed us how she sets up her lighting ratios using the meter for the subject and background as well as rim\accent lighting.  Near the end of the day, she showed us some of her retouching workflow including frequency separation.  We finished with a Q&A session.

Sonia followed up with an email with a list of the equipment she used and a detailed explanation of her retouching workflow.  Thanks to Sonia for her hard work presenting this class.