Every year I enjoy planning and working on our annual Christmas card. Each year we tend to alternate between a family photograph or some other theme. I have written about these cards in the past. This year we decided to do a photo booth theme (a strip of photos that look like they were taken in a photo booth.)
For this photo shoot I setup the camera on a tripod with a intervelometer. The intervelometer will fire the camera automatically on a timed basis. I also setup the camera so it was tethered to my laptop. So as photos were taken, the shots would be shown on the laptop screen in Lightroom. This gave us the ability to quickly check how the photos were coming out. We soon discovered that we had to make a conscious effort to try and coordinate our poses, if one person acted silly in a photo, it only worked if all three of us acted silly. The one downside of shooting in a tethered arrangement is the amount of photos I had to throw away because someone was looking at the laptop screen to see how we looked. Since I shoot digital, that is not much of a problem.
For the lighting I used my Alien Bee R800 ring light. I purchased this light when they first came out as part of the beta test and at a deep discount. I haven't had a chance to use it that much. I knew I was going to be shooting lots of images so I didn't want to burn through batteries using my flash strobes. After shooting with this ring light, I now understand the appeal of this look. It produces a very flattering ring of light that has a very pronounced drop off. You can see from the images above that the faces are nicely illuminated and the light quickly falls off where the lower portion of the photos are in shadow. I plan on using this light more for future portrait photo shoots.
We originally planned on using a strip of 3 photos for the Christmas card. However after shooting about 400 photos it was hard to narrow them down to just the 3 best. So we decided to change the card to show 6 total images. There were many photos from that shoot that I liked. However, the photo below is by far my favorite from the photoshoot.
For this photo shoot I setup the camera on a tripod with a intervelometer. The intervelometer will fire the camera automatically on a timed basis. I also setup the camera so it was tethered to my laptop. So as photos were taken, the shots would be shown on the laptop screen in Lightroom. This gave us the ability to quickly check how the photos were coming out. We soon discovered that we had to make a conscious effort to try and coordinate our poses, if one person acted silly in a photo, it only worked if all three of us acted silly. The one downside of shooting in a tethered arrangement is the amount of photos I had to throw away because someone was looking at the laptop screen to see how we looked. Since I shoot digital, that is not much of a problem.
For the lighting I used my Alien Bee R800 ring light. I purchased this light when they first came out as part of the beta test and at a deep discount. I haven't had a chance to use it that much. I knew I was going to be shooting lots of images so I didn't want to burn through batteries using my flash strobes. After shooting with this ring light, I now understand the appeal of this look. It produces a very flattering ring of light that has a very pronounced drop off. You can see from the images above that the faces are nicely illuminated and the light quickly falls off where the lower portion of the photos are in shadow. I plan on using this light more for future portrait photo shoots.
We originally planned on using a strip of 3 photos for the Christmas card. However after shooting about 400 photos it was hard to narrow them down to just the 3 best. So we decided to change the card to show 6 total images. There were many photos from that shoot that I liked. However, the photo below is by far my favorite from the photoshoot.