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Anatomy of A Family Photo Shoot

Posted on December 25, 2011

Hi Friends,

So here’s the question for the day: how many photos does it take to get the ideal Clark-Schecter holiday card picture? Now before you answer remember that this involves my being in front of the camera and not behind it. That added a degree of difficulty of about 200%.

What do you think?

If you chose any option other than the last choice, well, you must be one of those optimists!

Our first foray was on December 4th. I was going for a sun-going-down, golden hour look. It was unseasonably warm and the kid was cooperating. Honestly after that shoot, I thought I had nailed it then and there. Got some great shots. Rocked the backlighting. Of course when we had started, I had forgotten to tell Mason to take off his damn Transitions glasses! Those things have plagued me for years. I’ve spent way too long in previous years attempting to restore visible eyes behind those sun-darkened lenses.

But that notwithstanding, I was able to find some goodies. I then posted the ones I was considering for the card on Clickin Moms to get some feedback.

So I’m thinking to myself, these both look pretty good, if I do say so myself. Though I prefer the second one to the first because of Zara’s expression, I think the softness in our features from the backlighting might make it the weaker choice.

And then the feedback started to come in.

“Gorgeous shot, but that tree is too distracting,” one commenter said. From another: “I agree with the previous poster. Wish you had positioned yourselves differently.”

And I’m thinking to myself, OMG, there is a tree growing out of our heads. Am I mental? How did I not see that?!

The truth is that I had seen the tree but ended up at a loss about how to position us in relation to that tree. Somehow I thought that if there were three of us, it wouldn’t look as if the tree were growing out of all of our heads. But there is it, up close and personal. The tree IS growing out of our heads!

Other commenters attempted to assure me that those I would send the card to would not be nearly as distracted by the tree as we photogs are. Of course, by that point, I could see nothing in the photo BUT the tree! I decided to reshoot.

Unfortunately Saturday the 10th was nothing like Sunday the 4th. It was about 20 degrees colder and the ground was wet and mucky. The kid was cold and uncooperative and the hubby was surly because she was cold and he felt that I hadn’t dressed her warmly enough. I ended up rushing the shoot despite doing all I could to keep her in the warm car between set-ups. I then made the mistake of asking her to smile showing her teeth. She’d never had any problem with that in the past, but after getting back to my computer and uploading the images, I found that my kid must have decided that she was a beaver! I saw some of the most silly faces she has ever made.

I was so sad that night. What kind of photographer did I hope to be if I couldn’t even get a photo of my own family?! So my dear, supportive husband made me get right back in the saddle. The next day, he insisted in going out and doing it all over again. He’d dress Z in more layers and he would stop breathing down my neck in order to allow me to relax and do my thing. Of course Z ended up in one of her oppositional defiant modes again, but a total of 417 shots later, we had some good photos that didn’t have trees growing out of our heads!

Here are some of the outtakes:

 

Note the wonderful Transition lenses in these:

Yes, this still has the tree, but I love this shot!

So which photos made it to the card?

Front:

Inside top:

Inside bottom, flanking holiday message:

Not so bad, despite all that work, right? I’m going to use these to make a canvas wall photo collection for the house.

But I do have to show you guys the beauty of digital editing, though. Now you all know that I’m massively huge these days thanks for my steroids. Even though I’m in a feel good about myself because fat is better than dead place, I still shuddered a bit at how round both Mason and I looked in these images. I opted to use a can-be-used-for-good-or-for-evil editing tool called liquify. Using this PS tool, I managed to give us a bit of a digital diet in some of the photos:

Before is on top and after below. We lost a good 20 pounds with the use of technology! Mason wanted me to go even further, but no. These tools cannot be used to suspend all connection with reality!

So there you have it, my friends. The fun of a family photo shoot when you are both photog and subject!

Hope your holiday was wonderful! Best to you in the new year!

Look Before Depressing the Shutter!

Posted on November 17, 2011

This is a little lesson for all of us trying to balance the capturing of the moment with the antics of capricious children while avoiding turning our cameras back to auto mode.

It was a Tuesday in the summer. I had brought my camera with me to work because I knew that I’d be taking Z to Castle Park at the end of the day. I wanted to work on spot metering and getting my exposure nailed in camera since I had had a few snafus months before.

It had been ages since I had used my nifty-fifty lens (50mm 1.4G), so I had to get re-used to zooming with my feet, as it were. I shot what I could and what Z would allow, but then as we were leaving I saw this cool patterned crosswalk that I thought would look fabulous in a shot.

Now if I had a time-freeze button, I could have pushed it and taken the necessary time to scope out the best positioning and the best shooting angle in relation to the setting sun, other people, and the fact that it was a freaking cross walk that cars were crossing intermittently. But you can imagine that at the end of the day, with a cranky preschooler, I had no time-freeze button with which to avail myself.

It became a quick dance of positioning (No, Z I will not let any cars come near you, I swear!), framing, metering/focusing, and then pressing the shutter. This is what resulted:

Notice something besides the epic cuteness of my kid? Yeah, I screwed the pooch with the leading lines and the photos’ balance. It looks off, cockeyed, if you will.

Finally realizing that in all my quick prep I had failed to consider the overall balance, I moved my position a little and begged Z’s continued patience and captured this:

Ahh, now that’s a lot better for the eyes. Not so jarring. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a heck of a lot better.

So this is a little reminder that you need to scan the scene fully before depressing the shutter, even in those I only have a second before my kid enters meltdown modes we often find ourselves shooting in. Your eyes will thank you!

Non-Crappy Vacation Photos

Posted on September 8, 2011

Hi friends,

The family and I went on a little trip to Hershey, PA over the Labor Day weekend. And though I brought The Precious (my camera, for the uninitiated!), I didn’t want to get into too much photographer drama with good ol’ vacation snapshots. For goodness sake, I didn’t think I could run around Hershey Park staging shots with decent backgrounds or ask the roller coaster operator to slow the coaster down so that I could catch a decent photo of my kid on her first ride!

Instead I tried some new things that seemed to help me get many more keepers. Here’s my list:

• spot metering (I got much better results in all the weird lighting that you can get in and out of rides)
• prime lens (I returned to my nifty fifty prime lens over my zoom)
• using dynamic area mode focusing rather than single area
• back button focusing (that’s a topic for another post entirely!)
• shooting in aperture priority rather than full manual (I worried about doing too much futzing in manual so I chose aperture priority and used exposure compensation when the exposure wasn’t where I wanted it to be)
• cranking up the ISO for low light (Flash? Nah! And who worries about noise when there are so many good noise reduction programs out there?!)

Here are some of the goodies:

Focus isn’t nailed in this one but I really loved her expression the first time the ride dropped!

First taste of cotton candy!

What’s your greatest challenge with vacation shots? (besides keeping sand out of the camera!)

More Studio Work

Posted on May 6, 2011

My last post showed you the fun I was beginning to have in working with studio shooting. (As much as a dusty back section of my unfinished basement can be called a studio!)

But I have to say that I’m hooked. Studio is a blast…as long as your seamless paper is longer than 53″ that is. Otherwise you’ll find yourself cursing a lot as the end of the paper shows up unwantedly in your shot.

Here are some recent favorites:

Yes, one day I will have the guts to invite someone other than my daughter and husband into the morass that is our basement.

Learning Studio

Posted on April 21, 2011

I decided to take a studio lighting class because I wanted to be able to manage lighting set-ups when necessary in people’s homes. But I honestly never thought I’d like working with studio shooting. It seemed too much like The Picture People or that crappy studio in Babies R Us. (Yeah, I said it!) Little did I know that fun that awaited me in my basement studio.

I learned the difference between short and broad lighting:

I think he looks better in short lighting. Our instructor says that most people do.

I did some inadvertent high-key (meaning overexposed) photos as I got the hang of metering:

Then I managed to get the kidlet into the act with him as I did some plays with dramatic light.

I love the shadowing on her face as she blew air onto her favorite daddy:

Then I got a Thunder Grey background and started having a ball (though I’m not so sure that Zeus the kitty is having as much fun in these):

Other than constantly fighting with my reflector, I was starting to get into the fun of studio work. When you control the light, you end up having oodles more fun with your subjects. This does not mean that you will see me anytime soon working at the Sears Portrait Studio, but hey, I’ll have fun creating interesting magic in my basement studio!

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