Mark's Musings: Father's Day Shoot

Family, History and Love

Wanda and I have been discussing, of late, the need to set down in writing some portion of our family history so that in the future our children and grandchildren will have the stories and tales of our lives direct from the source. The technophile that I am, I choose to do this online so that the what we write will be accessible and available for comment to our wider family (though I reserve the right to moderate those comments).

To that end, I have repurposed this blog. In coming posts, we will endeavor to provide an abridged story of our life (hey, everyone has their secrets). We're writing this for our children and their children and those that come later so elements of these tales will be familiar only to our family,

Monday, June 22, 2009

Father's Day Shoot

For Father's Day, instead of relaxing and watching movies, playing games, or just having some downtime, I spent the day prepping and shooting a set of portraits of my grandson (and his dad). First, I had to clean out the garage from all the yard items that were moved there the day before for my granddaughter's 3rd birthday party. Then I had to set up the backdrop, the fog machine and a set of gelled lights (one softbox with a flag, one gelled light on a boom with a 40 degree grid, another gelled light on a floor stand with a 30 degree grid, and the final gelled light on a floor stand with barndoors). Finally, I had to test and adjust the lighting.

The setup had to be right from the start, since I didn't want to unnecessarily subject my grandson to the fog, so I had my wife and daughter help me with the adjustments. Wanda was the stand in model, and my daughter operated the fog machine. I set the main exposure (the softbox) with a Sekonic L-508 light meter, then adjusted the gelled lights (height, direction and intensity) by monitoring the preview image on my digital camera (a Canon 1Ds Mark III with a 24-70 f/2.8L lens). The softbox strobe was an AB 800, the boom light was also and AB800, while the two floor lights wereWL 1600's. The softbox was triggered by a PW transceiver and the other lights triggered off optical slaves from the key light.

Here are the images with that setup:

For the remainder of the images, the gels and fog were removed, the black velvet backdrop was draped on a table, and the fire fighting gear was set up per Ryker's dad's specifications. I then added a large Photoflex reflector on the right side of the image to provide for more even lighting across the portrait. Ryker was getting a bit fussy by this point, but we cajoled him into some nice expressions: