Lions and Tigers and Flash Photography...oh my!!!

I finally got to do my first family shoot. For free of course because it was PB (portfolio building) and actually, I would chalk this up to PPB (pre-portfolio building). They wanted to do it at night and in front of lights and I warned them...."I'm mainly a natural lightist, my flash photography sucks big time.

The original plan was to have dinner at Hale Koa and take pictures there but "Mr. Speedy Cashier" Paul had to work that night so we had to have the pictures at church. I thought about it for a few days and my plan of action was....

1. Long shutter speed to get enough ambient light like the tree and Christmas lights in
2. Quick flash at end to light up the family

Looking over my pictures later, lessons learned:

1. I wish I had less of the background in the pictures...maybe not such a long shutter speed. Our church is having a series on villains and heroes in the Bible, thus, the cityscape in the back. But I let too much background detail. The buildings which just distract me...the folds in the tent overhead (our church is a temporary building) which I cloned out as much as possible but still not ideal.

So, I thought, oh, I'll just take an underexposed picture to get the lights all pretty and combine it with another picture that has the family well-lit. Hey, it takes effort to combine two pictures. I spent a lot of effort combining the two...and you work so hard to fix things that as it gets better and better, you start to think it looks perfect. Tim Gunn said it best on Project Runway. You know when you're at a farm and all you can smell is the s*** but then you get used to and you start to think it's fresh air. Sometimes you need someone to come in and tell you it smells like s***.

So, I show this photo to Scott and instead of being stoked, he just goes "hmmm, can you make them more blurry so maybe it matches the background more." I was so disappointed at his lackluster response but when you flip from a normal pic to this pic...then it is so blatant obvious, you're like "How did I think this looked natural?"



See, a little more natural. Not perfect, but better. Notice the top of the tent. I cloned out the side of the screen and this ugly lighting fixture. Oh, and I painted the top of the tent red just to be Christmas-ey.


Sometimes a crop creates a completely different feel. Same photo but with a landscape crop. This is the one they used for their Christmas card. Now, there was some artful work with it. The chances of having all ten people looking at the camera with non-weird expressions...Pretty slim. I had to photoshop some faces from other pictures in. I already forget which ones. Haley looks out of focus but I think she was moving so it blurred a little.