Birthday boy (and girl!)

On a Wednesday in July last year, having played my last tag rugby match of the summer, I was walking into the bar in nearby St. Mary’s RFC as I talked to my sister on the phone.  She told that I was an uncle for the third time, with the arrival of my second nephew, Samuel James.  He arrived bang on schedule too.  That was July 22nd, 2009, which means today is Samuel’s first birthday.  I won’t see him for the birthday celebrations today, but did catch up with him briefly last weekend at another birthday celebration.

Samuel’s great grandmother has just turned 90 years old, and her family (she is my brother-in-law’s grandmother) threw her a big party in Howth on Saturday evening, with her children, grand-children, and great grand-children all in attendance, and quite a gathering of friends and other family too.

My sister had recruited me for some quick group photographs so I arrived at the party a little after 5pm with about an hour to set up and take whatever photographs were desired.

My lighting scheme for the group photographs was as I’ve used now on a few occasions – two bare SB-600s at fairly high power on light stands, one at camera left and one at camera right, with each directed so that its light feathered across the front of the group, and aimed a little over their heads.  The lights were triggered by an on-camera SB-800 acting as  a commander only, and with a Stofen diffuser on top to spread the IR signal to both off-camera flashes.

It was a sunny day on Saturday, and we took the photographs outside, and I could have taken them without using flash at all, but I’d have had to face the group towards the sun to light them, and that would have resulted in a fair bit of squinting.  Using flash to light them, I was able to put the sun behind them (which itself acted light a back light), underexpose the ambient exposure by pushing to 1/250s, ISO 200, f/13, and still get enough power out of my lights by going to 1/2 power to lift the exposure of the group.

That lighting scheme gave me what is to me quite a familiar look to the image:

It’s not an award winning shot, nor is it meant to be.  But as a photograph of four generations of one family, it’s one for them to treasure.  And technically, it’s better than a shot in ambient light with all of them facing the sun.

You can see how strong that sun was from the shadows on the grass in front of the group, but my two flashes do a good job of countering it and give me a shot with plenty of  contrast but also enough detail in all the faces.  I was probably at the limits of the flashes here – well I could have gone to full power, but the recycling time would have been hard to work with for a shot of this number of people (the first shot I took, of everyone, had about 80 people in it).

After getting the group shots, there was time to take a few of some individuals with the birthday girl, and for these I switched to my Lastolite Ezybox Hotshoe, hand-held close to the subjects (typically at camera right) by a “voice activated lightstand”.  For a bit of separation with the background I gelled this with a CTO gel and put the camera white balance to tungsten to get that background to go a cooler blue as a contrast to the warmer skin tones.

The photograph at the top of this post shows today’s birthday boy with last Saturday’s birthday girl, with just 89 years separating them.  Happy birthday to both of them.  Samuel is coming to visit us tomorrow week as his sister and mom go to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and while they’re out we’re going to throw him a little party to mark the occasion.  I hope he’s looking forward to it as much as I am!