Very Strobey Christmas

28 December 2008

I'm getting much more comfortable with the strobes, so I've been using them more in everyday situations, like candid photos at Christmas gatherings.

I had the Strobist Christmas Morning setup in mind most of the time, so I usually just laid a strobe or 2 in a high spot in a corner and pointed it at the ceiling. Sometimes they'd all fire, sometimes not, so there was some unintentional variety. In most of the photos, I was again too lazy to color correct the strobe, so I had a bit of white balance work on my hands in post-processing.

Holiday Photos

Sitting in my parents' relatively dark (photographically speaking) living room, I quickly decided to fire up the flash, so I just put it on the shelf behind me, pointed it up and I was ready to go -- slightly directional light from a natural angle (above).

Mom and John

At the in-laws, I popped it up on the mantel on the side of the room, then I could move around and get a nice light from one side, but still bounced off the ceiling, so the photos don't all look the same. When I was shooting for the opposite side of the room, I just needed to remember to open up the aperture a bit.

Ben and Paige

The most elaborate setup was still pretty simple -- 2 lights in opposite corners setup in 30 seconds -- One light on a shelf, and the other on my light stand. It was looking good on the camera LCD, but I didn't look close enough at the histograms to see that I was under-exposing by 2 stops. In the end, these shots were my worst, because they had so much noise from adjusting the exposure on the computer. The setup worked pretty nicely, though.

I'm definitely getting the strobes to do mostly what I want them to do.

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