I’ve received a lot of comments on my Christmas Card , so I thought I’d share the techie, “how-to” set-up for this particular photograph.
It was actually a pretty easy setup, the biggest challenge with this shoot was getting my 2 year old “model” to cooperate. For the lighting setup, the trick is to not overpower the Christmas tree lights with any additional lights you might use to light your subject. This need for a highly directional and focused light eliminated the possibility of using a sofbox on Jack’s face. Instead, I used a single Elinchrom studio strobe, with a 10 degree grid spot attached to the front of the reflector. The grid focusses the light down to a small spot on the floor, which only lights up the area where Jack is laying down. While a grid is not exactly the softest light source around, the fact that Jack is only 2, and has smooth skin and round features, it works.
So that takes care of the lighting from the right side. However because Jack is facing to the left, his face would fall completely into a dark shadow. The look that I wanted was his face to appear as if it was lit by the christmas tree lights themselves. The only problem with tree lights is their intensity is very low (great for your electric bill, bad for your photographs). So I added a 2nd light (a Canon 580EX) behind the tree out of the frame, and bounced it into the corner of two walls. The bounced light off of the walls comes under and through the tree just enough to provide some additional fill on Jack’s face. All of the lights were triggered courtesy of the ridiculously versatile RadioPopper system (JRx transmitter and reciever to fire the Elinchrom, and a Px transmitter and receiver to fire the 580Ex slave) Even though this was an all manual setup, I could’ve used the the Canon 580 in its TTL mode and let the RadioPopper handle the communication between the master and the slave.
Since the color temperature of the tree lights is somewhere in the tungsten region (very warm), the flash heads were both gelled with an amber gel to match the color temperature of the tree lights.
Now that the direction of the lights is taken care of, all that is left is to figure out the exposure settings. In order for the tree lights to show up and actually “twinkle,” you need a a small aperture which requires a longer shutter speed. A couple of test shots confirmed that an aperture somewhere between f6.3 and f8.0 would be enough to get the sparkle from the lights, and a shutter speed of 1/8 at ISO 400 let in enough ambient light to see the detail of the tree and the ornaments. Now that I know what my ambient reading is, the last step is simply to adjust the output of the strobes to match my exposure settings (It sounds a bit backward, but that’s how I figure out the proper exposure for combined ambient and flash exposures. If the exposure was all strobe, you simply meter, set the camera, and go). I adjusted the output of the main to about f5.6, and the fill light to about f4.0 (honestly, I didn’t meter the fill, I just set the main, and then fired a couple of test frames with different settings on the fill to get it where I wanted).
There wasn’t a lof of post-production Photoshop work on this one, other than adding the text elements and some burning and dodging. A lot of people thought my last “before & after” window was kinda cool, so here’s the “out-of-camera” version and the final product:
Take a look at the window above, the left side of the screen is the original image, and the right side is the fully finished photograph. Use the links at the bottom to go back and forth between the original picture from the camera, and the fully finished photograph.
