How I Photographed My Grandsons Portraits
Grandson's portrait shot with one light.
We recently had a rather large family group weekend visit. This group included my 2 daughters and their very young sons, one each! Along with the visit comes the customary “I want you to take my boys portrait while we are here”, to which I always reply “no problem, I planned on it.”
Grandson's portrait on a fireplace with one light
Well as the weekend progressed our small house became a very big mess. You see….I don’t have a studio space so I have to set up somewhere in the house. It was too cold outside and the weather was rather nasty, so the park was a no go. Within this household mess it was hard to find a clear enough area to set up a background and some lights so I looked for an area that would not require a background set up.
The place I settled on was the fireplace. It gave me a decent background to shoot against and the Hearth (is that what you call the step in front of the fireplace?) is just the right height to seat the little portrait subjects.
For lighting I needed to keep it simple and quick. I decided on one main light and a reflector. The main light was placed at about 45° camera left and placed just above the level of their heads. This main light consisted of an old White lightning 5000 with a 36″ white umbrella. I then feathered the light by aiming the center of the umbrella’s bounced light just in front of the child’s face. Feathering the light in this manner also helped to keep the light level down on the fireplace. On the opposite side, directly to the subjects left and just out of the frame I placed a biological light stand (the Dad of the youngest) to hold a silver reflector. The reflector provided some highlighting to the left side of the head and helped to separate them from the darker background.
Lighting diagram showing portrait set up
Getting the exposure I wanted was the next step. I started by setting the WL5000 to its lowest power setting which is one third. Keeping the light output as low as possible would allow me to use a very wide aperture so I could keep my “Depth of Field” as shallow as possible. I did not want the fireplace to be as sharp as the subjects. My shutter speed was set at 1/125. The Canon 20D I was using will sync at 1/250 but with the cheap radio slaves I use to trip my lights I sometimes get a partial image because the reaction speed of the cheap radio slave is not that reliable. Shooting at 1/125 has pretty much eliminated that problem.
Now I know my lights enough to know I was going to get an f-stop of about f5.6. After my first shot I looked at the histogram on the camera and saw that to get the edge of the highlights close to the edge of the histogram I would need another stop of light. Opening up the lens to f4.5 gave me the histogram I was looking for. My camera was set to create a Raw file only. This allows me to fine tune the exposure in Digital Photo Professional before I output a TIFF for manipulation in Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2.
I am now ready to shoot. At this point the mothers of the two boys have changed their kids clothes and cleaned them up a bit. It didn’t last long…by the time I had enough shots in the bag they were a mess again!
In my next post I will cover the post processing I used to get the final photograph.