American Heart Association: Heart Ball at Hilton Americas, Houston, TX

The decor of Hilton Americas in Houston, Texas was augmented by glamorous women dressed in shades of red adorned with glittering jewelry largely accompanied by men dressed in the obligatory traditional black tuxedo as the "Who's Who" of Houston gathered for the annual ball of the American Heart Association.

I was photographing for a friend of mine, Todd Parker who is the owner of STP Images. We were suitably dressed in dark suits, white shirts and ties. The batteries in our cameras and flash heads were charged, digital cards were loaded and freshly cleaned lenses were loaded on our Canon bodies as we entered the hotel lobby. We headed up to the 24th floor where a VIP party was in progress, and immediately set to work taking photos of the event. I was shooting with my Canon 5D and a 24-70mm f/2.8L lens mounted on a bracket. The flash I used was a Speedlite 580EX unit with a diffuser mounted on the bracket above the camera connected to the hot shoe with the OC-E3 Off-Camera Shoe Cord. Not satisfied with the 4 batteries that the 580EX uses to power it, I attached a Canon flash battery pack CP-E4 to the bracket. I now had a total of 12 batteries powering the flash, with another 12 batteries in my suit pocket as backups. I had 3 spare digital cards and started snapping photos.

There are many things that can wrong, but the weak point of the set up is...? I quickly identified two weak areas. The first is that my fixed-arm bracket took incredible photos in landscape view. The photos were well exposed and people I photographed were flattered by what they saw. When I flipped the camera to the right so that it was in portrait mode, the flash head moved with the camera and I ended up with the most dreadful shadows appearing behind the people. Think about it. The flash head was pointed towards their chest/neck area and the shadow was then projected onto the closest wall. Not a pretty sight. The second area that concerned me was point where the off-camera shoe cord attaches to the flash head. Essentially, you have 1/2" of stability, and if you bump up against someone or a table, the whole unit can come crashing to the floor. The glue between the hot foot and the part that connects to the bracket is amazingly weak. I didn't have to deal with this issue, but there was another photographer who had to. I helped him out with some elastic bands I keep on the head of my flash (very ghetto-looking colours too!) but he was able to borrow a spare from someone else.

What did I learn? Keep a spare off-shoe camera cable in your bag and use a camera bracket which allows you to flip the camera from portrait to landscape and back again, while the flash unit remains stationary.

Overall, I was very pleased with the quality of the photographs. You can view them here yourself. Please let me know your thoughts.