And baby makes three

I like to be diverse with the images I post on this blog, so for someone to make an appearance here twice within three and a half weeks is pretty good going, especially when that someone is only 30 days old.  But after a fun evening spent in the studio with Samuel and his older brother and sister, Matthew and Abbie, I just had to post this shot today.

The kids are in Dublin for the national sailing championships in Dun Laoghaire, which Matthew is competing in, and knowing that they would be around for a few nights I booked the studio last night and invited them in for a photo shoot.  My hope was to get some nice shots of the three kids together, as well as individual shots of each of them.

I knew it would be necessary to work around Samuel’s mood. He’s not big into modelling just yet – his main interests are a little more fundamental (milk and sleep) – so to get any photos of him would require a little bit of good timing and a lot of good fortune.  It would also require being ready to go when he was.

With that in mind, and not wanting to have Matthew and Abbie wait around long enough for them to get bored either, I got most of my lighting setup in the studio in advance of their arrival.

I knew I wanted to produce high-key images on a seamless white background – they are perhaps a bit of a cliche for child portraits, but they do look great, and are generally fun images.  To achieve that look I settled on a four light strategy, and used the big studio lights rather than my small flashes to ensure I didn’t run into problems with power or recycling times when trying to throw that much light around the studio space.

The white seamless backdrop is paper, hung from a roll about 8 feet high, and while the height of this was perfect, at times I found the width (perhaps 10 feet) to be a bit limiting.  In order to control light on the kids I had to bring them as far away from the background as I could, and to avoid distortion I wanted to use a mid-length lens (I ended up at about 40mm most of the time).  That pushed me right back against the far wall of the studio, and if I moved the camera left or right depending on how the kids moved, I sometimes took in some of the studio wall at either side of the backdrop. As problems go this isn’t a biggie with high key portraits though as you can clone in more white if needs be.

My bigger problem was controlling light spill on the subjects, and I had only limited success with that, but shooting in RAW I was able to recover alot of the contrast later in Aperture.

Two of the four lights were either side of the back drop, pointed across it, and set to give me a pretty even reading of f/16 across the width.  To avoid hot spots the light on the left pointed towards the right edge of the backdrop and vice versa in a criss cross fashion, and I had just a reflector as a light modifier to maximise their output.  Both lights were 250W sources, running at about 1/8th power to give me that f/16 reading on the light meter.

I used another light in a large softbox at camera right as my main light, at 45 degrees to the plane of the camera, and elevated above, but still close in to, the subjects.  The power on this is set to give me an aperture of f/8 on the subject.

I used a final light in a small softbox at camera left as my fill light – to give shape to the faces, lift the shadows, and also throw some light on the floor at camera left. The angle of this light as as for the main, but it was a bit further back.  It’s power gives me an aperture of f/5.6.

With the main light and fill light both firing, the light falling on the subjects is f/11, with the white background a stop over that, giving me the nice seamless high key look.

I had three of the four lights setup when the kids arrived in so was able to use them as test models for some final shots to tweak the settings, and the shoot could then begin.

To try to keep it interesting, I changed between the models and their groupings at regular intervals, starting with Abbie on her own, adding Matthew, then some shots of him on his own, then some of Samuel on his own.  In between the first two sets of shots Samuel slept soundly behind the scenes, and when Matthew and Abbie lined up one in front of the other it was a good opportunity to add a sleeping Samuel to the scene.  I got about 6 shots before he started to get a little cranky, and the one above is probably my favourite.

The shoot itself was good fun, and I think the kids enjoyed it too.  It was nice to be able to get some nice photographs of the three together so soon after Samuel’s arrival, and I look forward to editing more shots from the shoot over the weekend.  Keep an eye out for a follow up post using the same lighting but different posing to create an individual shot of Matthew.

Incidentally, if you would like some portraits like this done do get in touch – it’s a quick and easy process that the kids will enjoy, and that will generate some lovely images to look back on when they get older.