So here we are super close to the Holiday’s (that’s Christmas for those of you in England), and we needed some new pics to put on our cards.
In the past this has been a pretty painful experience for everyone. I wanted to create some nice pics for Lisa (so the pressure was one) and James and Abi were made to clean up and pose for pictures (which they hated).
However, over the last few years I’be got a lot faster at capturing these types of images and this year I wanted to be especially quick as we were planning on taking the pictures outside in the rain! Redmond town center has a nice Christmas tree and we thought it would be nice to shoot the kids in front of that. As you would expect the weather was crappy with a light rain coming down the whole time.
To make this super fast I grabbed my Fuji X100T camera which is a fixed focal length (35mm) camera so I couldn’t zoom in or out with he camera. This made me “zoom with my feet” and enabled me to quickly position the kids in front of the tree and grab the shot.
Obviously it was dark out (these shots were taken around 6pm), so I needed some light on their faces. Now I could have gone nuts and got out any number of lights and light modifiers but I again chose to go really simple. I grabbed a single Nissan i40 speed light that I triggered off camera using an infrared trigger. The camera, light and trigger all fitted in my coat pocket and were super easy to set up and use.
I just held the light at arms length off to my left pointing in the general direction of James and Abi and took the shot.
Each image took around 15 seconds and we captured the shots we wanted super fast. James’ girlfriend Bale was with us and he wanted a couple of shots with him and her and we captured those really quickly too!
Lisa was pleased with the images and James and Abi were happy as they didn’t have to stand in the rain for a long time (something that would have been the case a couple of years ago). I’ve clearly come a long way.
Anyway here are the three images that are going on the cards.
