Strobist lesson on location with the Digital Divas Meetup GroupFor over a year I have been teaching 1-on-1 private DSLR Photography lessons. A couple weeks ago April from the Digital Divas Meetup.com group contacted me about teaching some photography lessons. I proposed a beginner's off camera camera flash (strobist) lesson and 11 divas signed up. We met at a beach on Treasure Island about an hour and 15 minutes before sunset, and as you can see in the photo above, went well into complete darkness.
For in the field lessons, i.e. when you actually shoot, I choose to teach 1-on-1 private lessons because I want to maximize how much a student can learn in the normal 2-hour lesson block time. Basically it comes down to teaching one student a lot, or, for group lessons, teaching many students potentially only a little.
Also with a group lesson there are many more unknowns that come up. Pretty much each of the eleven students had a different camera, save for two students how had Canon 50D's. However, I assumed that anyone signing up for a beginning strobist class, a semi-advanced photography skill, would already have mastery over changing basic settings on their DSLR.
Despite those challenges, I was able to setup a situation where each student got a multiple chances to use an off camera flash. I ended up just setting up my own speedlights using my own triggers and just passing the transceiver to the next student, one after the other. Although my teaching efficiency was far lower than during a private lesson, it seemed all the students learned something about off camera flash, especially how cool it is and now have a new area of photography to explore.