A Barrel Of Monkeys :: Leigh Ann Hines | Durham Photographer

Monday, May 18, 2009

  

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Which is harder to keep together, a barrel of monkeys or a couch full of children? Not sure, but my bet is on the children. Try keeping 7 young children together, relatively happy, and seated, without any cookies for bribery? Wasn’t sure they’d all fit, but sure enough, we squeezed them in. Of course, there had to be a few rearrangements to keep the crying to a minimum. But everyone was relatively patient, for the 3 minutes we actually got them all to sit still.

Shooting notes:
Gear= Canon 1DmarkIII, Canon 16-35mm f/2.8, Canon 580EX with 60″ reflective umbrella
ISO400,  1/125  at  f/7.1
Canon Speedlite at camera right, set to 1/2 power, bounced into a 60″ reflective umbrella.

I used a relatively tighter aperture to achieve a deeper depth of field, keeping all seven children in focus. I also backed my light up a bit so that the light falloff would be similar from one end of the couch to the other. With a somehwhat greater light-to-subject distance and a tighter aperture, I needed to  use more light power to correctly light them all, so I bumped up my flash power to 1/2 power.

Posted in portraits

by leighann

5 comments

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May 18, 2009 - 10:43 pm

Michele - So so cute.

May 19, 2009 - 9:22 am

Nathan - Adorable. What a cute group of kids. Love the texture of that couch.

May 19, 2009 - 12:14 pm

TexasToast - Amazing. You always light everything so well and so naturally. I love it. Love your conversion too. Willing to share your “recipe”?

May 19, 2009 - 1:11 pm

Rebecca - Wonderful! How did you get all of them with their eyes open, without fingers in their mouths, hands over their faces, etc. Tha’ts a lot of little kids to wrangle. Fantasic job, as always.

Thanks for the shooting notes. it helps a lot. But still, I can never seem to get a whole couch of people lit well from one end to the other. You said you backed the light up? Wouldn’t moving the light closer put more light on them instead of moving the light farther away? Seriously, when are you going to start offering workshops? Sign me up!

May 21, 2009 - 12:27 am

leighann - Rebecca, there is a drastic fall off of light close to the light source but that fall off gets more gradual the farther away from the light you are. So, what this means is that if the light was right next to one side of the couch, the other end would be at least 2 stops darker, which wouldn’t work well for this shot, using one single light. By backing the light up, the fall off when it hits the couch is more gradual, so the whole couch, from one end to the other, is within one stop. It follows the Sum of Squares law, but don’t ask me to do the math. So the light will less as a whole, but more consistent across the area, which is what I needed.

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