Photo Sharing: People & Portraits

[fractal]

We had a baptism in the family.

 

[fractal]

 

[kimmar067]

 

[kimmar067]

Deleted

 

[kimmar067]

 

[kimmar067]

Deleted

 

[kimmar067]

Nice!

 

[klmall]

Nice!

Thanks!

 

[MarkBarbieri]

This is a test picture I took of our pseudo-daughter in front of our Christmas tree. I covered the lens with a 4"x4" piece of wood with a heart shaped opening in it. I shot the picture at 200mm with an f/2.8 aperture to throw the lights behind her out of focus. Out of focus objects in the background normally take on the shape of the lenses aperture, but the heart shaped opening in the wood dominated the effect, turning them into hearts. If there is an interest, I can post a thread on how I made and used the "filter".

 

[Tuffcookie]

This is a picture of my granddaughter, Tabby. She is a senior in high school this year and is in the early college program.

TC

 

[MarkBarbieri]

That was me in my heavily bearded days (I was trying to look scruffy so that I would get laid off). My wife bought me ornaments to hang from my beard.

 

[klmall]

 

[kimmar067]

 

[kimmar067]

 

[MarkBarbieri]

Canon 5D Mark II, 35m, f/8, 1/125s, ISO 400

I have no idea who these people are. We were there (Pacific Grove, CA) taking pictures of our kids at sunset. I was all set up with my wife holding an external flash with a CTO gel shooting through a umbrella attached to the end of a cheap painter poll we picked up at Home Depot. Because of the flash, I was shooting in manual exposure and I had everything dialed in. I got several shots of the kids and released them to go run around and explore in that way that kids do at the sea's edge. Then I noticed that this couple had been waiting to perch on the rock to try to get a selfie. I offered to take a shot for them with my gear and email it to them. I have no idea if they were on their first and only date and had stopped seeing each other before they got my picture or if they were on their honeymoon and are still married and look at this picture hanging somewhere in their home. But it was a nice picture and I hope that they liked it.

Incidentally, CTO stands for "color temperature orange". If you've ever shot a picture with a flash in a room light by tungsten lights, you've seen that the much cooler light from the flash doesn't match the warm light from the room lights. The fix that, you put a CTO gel on your flash or maybe a 1/2 cut or 1/4 cut if you want a little less of the orange look. In this case, I wanted to match the warm glow of the sunset even though the sun is behind them an, if you think about it, can't be the source of the light on their faces.

Here's one of the shots we got of our boys.

Canon 5D Mark II, 24m, f/8, 1/125s, ISO 100

I just noticed that I bumped the ISO 2 full stops (100-->200-->400) between the pictures. Judging by the EXIF data, there was only about 4 minutes between the shots. That's a good indicator of how quickly the light was falling.

A few other thoughts about the pictures - I already mentioned the CTO to get the warm light. Shoot through an umbrella made the light from the flash larger and thus softer. Small lights cast hard shadows and softer lights create softer shadows with a more graceful transition between lit and unlit parts. Putting the flash and umbrella on a paint pole allowed us to get the flash even closer to our subject and the closer the light, the larger it is relative to the subject. After all, the sun is HUGE, but it is so far away that it is more like a small light source.

I put the light on the left side of the subjects for two reasons. First, I like to light from the opposite side of the sun. It's easier to balance the light that way. Also, I like to put the light on the side of the person with the darker clothing. That's more important when someone is wearing white because it is easy to blow out white clothes when properly exposing for someone's face, but I still think it helps get a better look when you light the darker clothed person more than the lighter clothed person. That's even more true when you have a significant difference in skin tones. I almost always put the light on the side of a darker skinned person because it makes lighting a couple or a group easier that way.

I used an umbrella rather than a softbox because an umbrella packs down to almost nothing when you travel but a softbox is bulky even packed away. Also, the umbrella (which I'm shoot through rather than using it as a reflector) is less efficient in that a lot of the light bounces back and away from the camera. In this case, that's a good thing because the light was so low that it can be hard to get the light from the flash low enough for the image. When used indoors, it can be a problem because that light is going to bounce off of things behind you and have unpredictable effects. But if I had a softbox, I could have put a grid on it which would reduce the amount that the light spilled onto stuff other than my subject. In this case, the rocks were too brightly lit by the flash, but that was a quick fix in Lightroom, much quicker than working up some kind of masking system.

 

[kimmar067]

 

[kimmar067]

 

[MarkBarbieri]

Canon R5, 28mm, f/8, 1/640s, ISO 200

 

[klmall]

 

[kimmar067]