Family portrait session

Past Saturday I got an opportunity to photograph a lovely family.

Kids are always interesting and it's not always easy keeping an eye on everything but I must say these children were very nice :-)

Here is a little sneak peak of the photos from the garden of the Carlyle house in old town Alexandria.

5 min studio shoot

With Halloween we had Uncle Dave and Aunt Linda visiting from Ohio (yeah that's a long drive).

So here is what happens when you have family see the portraits hanging just about anywhere and you are asked the question: "So you are doing those picture here in the house?".

Yep, scramble to do a 5 min setup hoping that you can wing it and get the light just about right in about no time.

With that in mind I did a kind of simple setup with the Alien Bee B800 in a octabox on camera right and the Nikon SB800 in a shoot through umbrella on camera left. A quick measure had the AB coming out with just under f/8.0 and the SB800 at f/5.6 or there abouts ;-)

Here is a drawing of the above description. Sooo much easier on the eyes ;-)



Ok first up is the toned and bw version of the sit down, look at me and ... smile



But that's no fun at all.... So of course there are a few others where it was actually fun and games. Somehow the "relax... this won't hurt a bit" doesn't always work ;-)

But here they are a little less formal.



Soo it was just about 10 min... but a fun 10 min :-)

Collage of the kids

Here is the latest collage of the wee folks.

Interested in knowing how to this was created? Leave a comment and I will get around to making a tutorial on this one too ;-) If the interest is there.

A few from the studio

So I have been following the alien bee blog (http://www.paulcbuff.com/forums) for quite a bit and recently saw one topic where a simple light setup was the topic.

So had to give it a go and one should think I have enough girls around the house to try it out sometimes ;-)

After Jacki's interview I grapped a couple of quick shots. Here is one that illustrates the simple light setup worked out pretty good (even though I forgot the reflector). You can btw. find the specific topic here

Update Update Update



And here follows the "old" ones



Just for the fun of it I was experimenting with darkening the edges and well ended up adding an overlay with a highpass layer. What do you think?



Just as I was cleaning up tonite Emma got in and wanted a few photos. So we played around for a bit and just for good measures here is one of Emma and Mom playing around in the studio. Not close to perfect but I guarantee it's fun :-)