Air traffic controller

A busy weekend which took in a wedding, a christmas party, an extended family dinner (and lunch) and dinner with friends still left time for a some photography.  And eating.  Lots of eating.  Saturday evening was spent in my wife’s uncle’s house in Malahide, where the extended family had gathered with aunts uncles and cousins home from England and the US for a chritmas visit.

Photography during the night included Aoife’s cousin Neal playing with my fisheye lens (he’s seen some of the photos on this blog), me trying to capture some action shots in the “catching Maltesers in your mouth” competition, a group shot of all but two of the extended family, as well as some candid shots.  Jimmy, who is over from Massachusettes for the week, was trying to get a remote-controlled helicopter to fly in a controlled manner (not an easy task) with a few challenges being set by his younger brother Neal over the course of the evening to land it in the light shade, on the wall lights, and do a flyover of the candles by the fireplace to blow them out (that last one sounded like a recipe for disaster, involving as it did an slightly out-of-control helicopter made from flammable material, and about four naked flames).

As Jimmy concentrated on honing his pilot skills, I encouraged him to do a flyover in front of my camera so that I could take a few photos of him with the helicopter in mid flight.  It took a while but we got there in the end, and I have a sequence of four shots with the chopper flying from left to right.  This particular shot is my favourite, showing the concentrated effort required to try to get the thing to go where he wanted it to go.

The shot is lit very simply with an on-camera SB-800 pointed straight up at the ceiling, with no diffuser, but turning the ceiling into a very large overhead light source.  The flash is set to TTL and the camera is in manual mode, with a wide open aperture and a high ISO (to help the flash along) and a reasonably fast shutter speed to keep the light mainly sourced from the flash, and help keep the helicopter frozen in mid-air.