Christmas Candles

Nikon D300s, Manual Mode, Nikon 18-105mm DX F3.5-5.6 VR, VR on, hand held, f/5,6, 1/80s, ISO200, edited in Lightroom 4.3.

Children are Tough to Photograph!

As many of you know, I spent most of December shooting kids in a mall, and I have to say, it was tough! I have a new admiration for photographers who specialize in working with children!

But it is very rewarding to photograph children as well, to see the reaction of the parents when they see the prints for the first time and you know they just love it! The reaction of the children can be priceless. For me the interesting thing was to see how each individual child's character really comes to the fore, especially in the themed setups we did.

In the photo below are three very different siblings doing very different things in reaction to being in the same shot. Rather than trying to keep maximum control over what the children were doing while posing, I just let them have free rein and got some great memories for their parents.

Some parents ended up getting several extra prints made for all the grandparents, uncles, aunts, god-parents, etc. which was very good for business!

 An explanation of the set-up used is here: My Santa Set-up

My Santa Set-up

Since the 5th of December I have been taking the typical Santa in the mall pics that we see every year! It's actually quite fun, but a lot of work as it has been crazy busy. While I have been there a lot of "pros" and amateurs alike have expressed an interest in my lighting set-up, how I do it, and why! It seems that the "strobist" concept hasn't caught on in South Africa the same way it has elsewhere in the world. So here is a short explanation and a few sample pics.

My basic setup is a couple of Nikon sb flashes, one sb700 and one sb600. I bounce both of these into umbrellas in order to diffuse the light and get a nice even lighting over the entire set. I use a shoot through umbrella and a black backed bounce umbrella, and the reason these two? Because it's what I have of course! If I used studio lights it would become much more complicated and require cables running electricity around for people to fall over, it wouldn't be as easy to unpack and pack, etc. Here is a pull back pic of the entire set-up:

There is a very large skylight directly above the area where we are located and the light coming in is constantly changing because of the sun moving, clouds, rain, etc. so in order to keep the light and colour consistant I totaly underexpose the scene by setting my camera to manual at 1/200s and f11. Without flash it looks like this:

My flashes are set to TTL and they automatically bring the exposure back up to normal. I fire them wirelessly via Nikons very cool CLS system. The final result looks like this:

Perfectly exposed, sharp, and with very consistant colour! I don't have time to download these to a computer, tweak them and then print them, so I shoot jpg and make sure that all my settings are correct in camera to achieve the fastest workflow and print them directly from my SD cards at the lab in the mall. The resultant prints are just great!

So if you want to put that nice shiny new dslr to good use and actually make some money to justify the expense then you now know how to do Santa pics for Christmas 2012! Whoohoo!