While living in Ottawa is pretty standard fare for a “major” city, we are fortunate to be very close to some lovely greenspace… or this time of year, orange and yellow space.

The fam and I took a quick expedition to Gatineau Park last weekend to enjoy the last of the fall weather. Of course I can’t just “go out” for a walk – I have to bring some GEAR with me. While the #phodo in me wanted to figure out how to strap an Elinchrom Quadra pack to my kids’ back, the sensible me decided on minimizing my gear-haul to MAXIMIZE my family enjoyment.

My lighting rig was pretty simple, a 580exII, a Pocketwizard miniTT1 (transmitter), Pocketwizard FlexTT5 (receiver) and a trigrip diffuser to soften the light. I knew I’d have an assistant to hold my rig and help me take pics of Mel and the kids since the MILVAL was on-hand (Mother In Law Voice Activated Lightstand). The trigrip is pretty handy because it has a firm handle for people to hold. She’d hold (or try to hold) the flash a foot or so away from the trigip and the flash would pop onto, and diffuse through the material.

The advantage of the Mini & Flex was that they’d allow me to shoot TTL flash as well as high-speed synch. I normally use flash in manual mode, so TTL actually took me a bit longer than a normal shot would (-EV my exposure, +EV my flash… then down again, argh, that’s not right – repeat). High-speed sycnh meant I could use the flash at faster shutter speeds – my camera is limited to a 1/250th sych speed and we were going mid-day, f22 sun etc. – and balance the crazy outdoor light to add some definition and drama to my portraits.

Maybe it’s a bit heavy handed, maybe you like it, but please – leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Since the exif data is nuked on this collage here’s the detail on the images: