Look who’s at the door?

After a Christmas break it’s time to resume normal (maybe – we’ll see how regular my posting is over the next few days) service on the blog.  I’ve taken a few shots over the christmas break, and as it’s a time that one spends around the family, don’t be surprised if you see some family members cropping up here over the next while.  I’ll try to post some of the more “creative” shots though to keep things interesting.

We’ll start with my niece, Abbie, who is no stranger to the blog having first appeared on it in the early days.  Abbie arrived down to my parents’ house in West Cork with her brothers and parents (my sister and brother-in-law) so that all of us could exchange Kris Kindle presents on the night before Christmas.

Abbie, like most kids her age, gets very excited when her extended family are around, and especially so when Santa is due to arrive that evening.   Even so, there was still time to stop and play with the Fisher Price toy house that my mother keeps especially for Abbie’s visits, and that was once owned by my younger sister Una, making it probably about 25 years old, and still going strong.

As Abbie played, I was busy snapping photos of the rest of us opening presents (and mainly of my godson Samuel looking cute – more on that tomorrow), and at one stage looked towards where Abbie sat and could see her through the windows of the toy house.  That gave me an idea so I asked her to lie down and look at me through the door of the house.  I needed her to move back a little out of the house’s shadow so that I could auto-focus on her (I don’t really trust my manual focus abilities with my eye-sight) and then took a shot lighting it, as I was lighting all shots that evening, via an SB-800 bounced off the ceiling.

I took this shot and a tighter one, and I love the result of this wider one in particular.  As for the Kris Kindle and what I received – well, if things go quiet on the blog in the new year, it may well be that I am watching the Sopranos from start to finish.  More shots taken on Christmas Eve coming over the next few days, all lit the same way (bounced flash off the ceiling) but each with a different look.