Unintended Success

Ambience of Nativity

This photo is interesting in that it is not what I intended it to be. My wife gave me the idea for the photo when I was doing some test shots of my daughter in front of our admitted Charlie Brown Christmas tree. She said a silouette of her in front of it would make for a beautiful effect. The setup would be simple. Kill the ambient but setting a fast enough shutter speed (1/250) and then adjust the light to hit just the tree. A short snoot would work well, or moving the seated subject far enough away from the background as well.

At the time I was shooting through a white 42" umbrella to camera left. One of the things about shooting through an umbrella is that it throws light pretty much everywhere, rather than reflecting it which makes the light a bit more directional, or snooted where you're almost focusing a spot light. Because of this, every though I position the light right, I did not get my intended effect. This was to little consequence as both my wife and I immediately loved the effect and took a few more shots before ending up with this. PP was minimal as wel, with jsut the kevlin being raised a bit to give the image a warmer feel. It's a great pleasure to get the image right in camera with minimal post-processing, even if it wasn't your intended effect.

Also from this shoot:



Post processing included Noise Ninja to smooth out the image as well as a slight Glamour Blur action.