In an effort to develop my Rockstar Family Photography idea I recruited some rockstar friends for a photo shoot.  We scheduled it a week out and when the day of the shoot came around (March 6th) it was nasty and stormy.  Seriously what the heck, this is San Diego???  I got in touch with them that morning and tried to call the shoot off, they informed me that they still wanted to do it and Adam offered to bring me a sweater if I was going to be a wuss.  Naturally it was game on!  I grabbed a fellow strobist, Matt Jones, to help and we headed to the shoot.

We had planned to do the shoot in areas of SD that they were particularly fond of and I had scouted out some great spots earlier in the week.  We met up and to our surprise the area was dry and we only had mildly stormy looking skies.  As we set up for the first scene the wind kicked up and promptly blew in some rain.  We nailed down a few shots and moved to the second location on the other side of the building.  This worked great for Adam and Chelsea as they were in an arch way protected from the elements.  Matt and Myself, not so much…  When I bought by camera bag I noted that it had a sewn in rain flap that hid away in a velcro pouch.  I figured I would NEVER use it here in San Diego.  Turns out it works very well!

By the time we were done shooting that spot it was raining so hard we ended up just getting coffee and waiting for a bit.  Once it cleared we grabbed a few more shots in the area then it was on to this awesome little trashed “neighborhood” (4 houses) that happened to be accessible to us (we know the property owners).  We got there in the dark and decided to clear out the houses before we turned our backs to them for the shoot.  To our pleasant surprise we only found one crazy tweaker who tried to kick us out.  We informed him that we were allowed to be there and he jumped the fence and took off.  He came back once we were done and the police were called.  He ended up in the psyke ward for an evaluation.

The shoot was a lot of fun and my toes are almost thawed out a week of so later.  I learned a lot about technique and shooting in adverse situations.  The pictures came out fabulously so be sure to check out the whole set on Flickr.