A little history about Midland Strobists…

Nearly 3 years ago, a seasoned press photographer from America called David Hobby decided to create a blog called Strobist, which sparked a photography revolution.  Taken straight from the Strobist blog “This website is about one thing: Learning how to use off-camera flash with your dSLR to take your photos to the next level. Or the next ten levels.”   The Strobist blog also has a Flickr group, so that fans of the blog can discuss various off camera lighting techniques, which currently has 39,996 members, 182,481 images and 23,770 posts on it!  Yes, it’s that popular.

I stummbled upon Strobist.com just over a year ago and after reading through all of the previous posts and other various supporting material on the blog, I was hooked to the Strobist way of life.

There were often posts about strobist group shoots happening in America in locations like Seattle, where 50+ photographers would gather in an aircraft hangar or a multi storey car park and produce some stunning images.  This of course got me wishing that we had group meets like that here in the UK, or more importantly local to me.   So after creating a new thread on the strobist.com Flickr group and finding out that there were lots of people local to myself in the Midlands who read the blog and who would be interested in a local group shoot, thats when Midland Strobists group was started.

The first local group shoot was on Sunday the 13th of January 2008.  The first part of the shoot was held in the underpasses on the Aston Expressway in Birmingham, then on to the Custard Factory in the afternoon.  About 8 photographers and 6 models attended.

We’ve just held the 6th group shoot on Sunday the 7th of December 2008 and this time 20 photographers and 10 models attended, attendance was limited due to the location being a private office in the Mailbox in Birmingham.  We had to turn photographers down!

Check out our flickr group at http://www.flickr.com/groups/midlandstrobists/ to see our pictures, members and the latest discussions.