Location Shooting

A little before Robin was born, Jeff asked if I would be interested in making some studio-style images of her.

I usually cringe when people ask me to document their Kodak moments.  For one thing, I haven’t done any commercial work in over 23 years, and everyone thinks I am a better photographer than I do.

Then my mind ticks through my equipment.  Now that I have gotten more serious about evaluating my image-making capabilities, I can see how limited my best DSLR really is.  The chromatic aberration at wide settings.  The noise in low light.  The weird magenta tint that Canon spins into reds…

And the rest of my gear is a hodge-podge of things collected over the last thirty-plus years.  My light stands (from 1982) are falling apart, my seamless paper is in storage, my “studio in a box” (the shipping crate I carry stands, strobes and umbrellas in) is now full of doodads and hardware in a wide variety of condition and reliability.

The strobes I have are cheap little units that screw into light bulb sockets and put out about as much light as an on-camera flash.  So I am never sure if they will be adequate to light the space evenly, even when bounced from umbrellas.  So these photographic adventures are always about an act of faith and improvisation.

Fortunately, Robin is very very small, so I decided to use the dining room table as the set.  (In the test photo to the left, you can see a doll on the table that I used to make sure I was going to get workable results.)

I screwed the strobes into those clamp-on lamps you can get at the hardware store, and I bounced two off the dining room wall and one off the ceiling to create the look of being next to a very large window.

I held my breath and did my very best to channel Anne Geddes.  The results are not bad!  The light is diffuse and fairly even – as good as I have a right to hope for.

The rest I can handle in postwork – which reminds me that my version of Photoshop is also archaic.   🙁

Fortunately, these images need very little retouch, because I have a recently renewed focus (pardon the pun) on getting the image right the first time.  😉