Studio strobes on location

Well after the little test I did at home I figured I'd do a little field testing of my UPS powered Studio strobes. So I packed up the family for a portrait in the park. While I didn't get the shot I wanted, it wasn't due to the strobes or the power supply. Using a 45" shoot through umbrella, I was able to keep up with the sun at 3/4 power and below @ anywhere from 10 to 15 feet from the subject, I never ran out of juice on this rather quick session (50-60 shots).
What didn't work were my crappy Cactus II triggers - they failed to fire about 30% of the time and my camera was never more 6' from the strobe at any time. I'm getting real sick of these things - gonna have to buy me some REAL triggers when money isn't so tight.
The faulty triggers lead to a lot of frustration in the family portrait (see Matthew, my youngest) since I was taking each shot on a timer, I'd have to run around the pond for each shot. Needless to say, running over there and then having the trigger fail really sucked. (you can see me in the picture about to through my hands up because I thought the strobe didn't fire) One thing I am going to order right after I finish this post is a remote trigger for my camera, this self-timer approach is for the birds....

My Home Studio

Heck, it's my only studio. And since its in my garage it's not setup very often. But every time I do set it up I try my best to learn something new. It doesn't seem like a lot, but I sure my wife thinks it plenty for a hobby I think I have enough lights but what is really on my list is more light modifiers, some barn doors, scrims, and with that epoxied floor I could use some big black drop cloths to control the light.
My backdrop is only 12' wide, which at the time I thought was plenty until I learned that I shouldn't put the subjects so close to the background or else I get too much spill from the key light on to the background. I now put my subjects about 10-12 ft in front of the background but at that distance, I run out of background pretty quickly if there is more than one or two subjects.

Easter Lighting Setup

Had some pretty pleasing results from this years studio shots so I thought I'd diagram the setup:

The main light was tweeked to get a consistent F5.6 across a wide enough area to fit the whole family and I made sure there was enough distance between subject and background to have at least a 2 stop drop in light to keep it deep black.
Results:

My Studio

I thought that my Garage was huge when I built it, but the 30x44' space seems cramped when I set up my temporary studio in it. In order to get good separation between subject, camera, lights and backgrounds I using up about 2 1/2 bays so the cars get 'kicked out' when the 'Studio' is up. This year I had success with low key portraits using a single Photogenics 1200 with a 36x24" softbox placed about 7' out and 2-3ft left from the subject and about 8 ft high. A single reflector for fill. and my second Photogenics with a snout used as a hair light. This was evenly lighting the subject area for F5.6 and dropped off enough so the background some 11 ft. behind was 2-3 stops lower. Auto white balance on the 1dMkII seemed to have some trouble varying about 1000K from shot to shot.This kind of variation didn't seem too bad until I took a few white balance shots using an Expodisc synced the rest of the images in Adobe Lightroom which made all the difference. Gotta start using this thing more!

A sample of this session: