Family Photo for early 2010

Family Photo for early 2010, originally uploaded by Carl's Photography.

Larger size here - farm5.static.flickr.com/4014/4402208697_5091a4f2d9_b.jpg

Sabbath morning before church we made this family photo. We planned the previous night on doing it in the morning. We got up extra early to shoot it. I had the video camera out with the intention of recording it but I forgot to turn it on! We shot with it tethered into a laptop and went through several arrangements/poses. Out of about a hundred this was the best with everybody having good smiles etc.

This was shot in our main living room. The camera was about 20 feet away (shooting with the 85 mm really requires some distance). We were about 5 feet in front of the white backdrop. I had the flash in the 60" umbrellas at about 7 1/2' in height angled down at us and across. It was about 7 feet away from us to try and provide consistent light on everyone. I didn't want to go to full 1/1 power output on my SB-900 (because of recycling time) and so to keep it at 1/2 I increased my iso to 320. This allowed me to blow out the background with 2 flashes at about 1/8-1/4 power output and shoot at f/7.1 which resulted in about 3 1/2 ' depth of field (calculated with my handy dandy iPhone DOF calculator). I flipped the focus switch to manual after getting focus and never flipped it back. Fortunately, everything came out alright, but we did move around some and focus could have got off.


Taken with a Nikon D80.

* Exposure: 0.005 sec (1/200) [+]
* Aperture: f/7.1 [+]
* Focal Length: 85 mm [+]
* ISO Speed: 320 [+]

Strobist info: SB-900 into 60" Impact reflected umbrella camera left slightly and above. SB-800 and SB-600 behind us and shoot at white satin back drop to overexpose to white (one left one right). Triggered with pop up flash in commander mode.

Adobe Lightroom for initial processing. Adobe Photoshop for layers and curves this and that. Adobe Lightroom for cropping.