As a quick little getaway I headed up to Montreal to catch the tail end of the 2009 Montreal Jazz Festival.  If you like music, I suggest you take the opportunity to check out this event.  The festival basically takes over a major part of the city for about two weeks.  The festival isn’t just about Jazz, though that is obviously a major focus.  They have tons of other types of concerts, performers, art venues and general festival goodness throughout.

As you may have saw in a previous post I stayed at the W, Montreal.  What a great hotel.  It was right in the heart of downtown.  It was a very easy walk to the main festival grounds, Old Montreal, St. Catherine Street and basically everywhere else you want to visit.  (more…)

This weekend I got to test out my one week old Canon 5D Mark II.  First off, yes this camera is awesome.  I’m not going to write a review on it as there are tons already out there that go into extreme detail.  Suffice it to say the high ISO images, superb images on the full frame sensor and the 1080p movie mode are welcome improvements from my Canon XSi.  I’m not knocking the XSi, I still plan to keep it around as a backup and to let the girlfriend use it.

Back to the fireworks.  Last year for the fourth I shoot fireworks up at Alexandria Bay in the Thousand Islands.  You can see that flickr set here.  Overall I was impressed with some of the shoots, but I was excited to see what I could come up with this year.  The fireworks in Albany are set up from the Empire State Plaza.  I decided to set up shop just across the Hudson River.  I had a perfect view of the fireworks along with the larger buildings to better frame the shots.

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Recently there was a discussion started in the Strobist Group on Flickr talking about use a Sekonic L-358 light meter to remotely trigger a camera which in turn would trigger the remote strobes.  The original poster could not get the set up to work.  I knew this was possible as I have done very similar set ups (albeit at the time I didn’t have my light meter).  I went to work later that night on a mock set up to prove this will work.

My goal was to use my Sekonic L-558R to trigger a Pocket Wizard on the camera body causing it to trigger the remote strobes and take a picture.  Pocket Wizards have this feature built into their units, it’s called relaying.  From the manual of  Pocket Wizard Plus II, here are the steps in relay mode.

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