This year I wanted to take the twins’ portraits outside. I’d been wanting to do it at the park for a few years now, but this year the timing actually worked out well. Unlike in years past, Sam wasn’t as keen on having his photo taken so he went full anime on this one:
Even throwing Stella into the mix didn’t get him peeking:
I made some portraits of Scarlett. I used the same setup as when I did Sam and Stella’s November portraits, except with the octobox on the left this time.
Somewhat without intention, I’ve ended up alternating portraits for the twins between outdoor portraits and indoor portraits. This year was time for indoor portraits. (Although, to be fair, if it hadn’t been freezing, I might have ended up breaking the tradition) Here’s the setup I used:
It’s a variant on a setup that has been very successful for me with portraits of the kids. I went back to a white background for the first time in a few years. The last time I used it with Scarlett I had an uneven white that looked horrendous to my eye and was a real pain in the butt to try and correct in Photoshop (or was it GIMP?). I never got it quite right and ended up sticking to the black background for a while. But I wanted to do something different. So this time I grabbed my two studio strobes (I believe they’re 100W strobes that someone got me as a present some 8 or so years ago) and threw them into umbrellas to make sure the light would hit the background evenly. With these lights I had to go to somewhere around 80% power in order to get a pure white background according to the spectrograph in camera. Then I posed the twins in front of those lights, so they needed a light for themselves. I used my old Canon 580EX inside of my gigantic octagon (I think it’s somewhere around 3 feet or more in diameter). I wanted to shoot at F8 to try and get the best chance of ensuring the twins would be in focus, so I had to push the 580EX to full power. After this session, I ended up buying a bracket so that next time I can throw my 430EX in there, too.
Sparklers were an ever-present feature of my childhood 4th of July celebrations. This year we introduced the twins to sparklers (I’m pretty sure Scarlett has used them at least once before). They kids had a lot of fun and there were a couple burn-scares, but I think it was worth the slight parental anxiety. (Did our parents care? They seemed a lot more laize-faire about us with sparklers, but maybe they were just good at hiding their fears?) Took out the DSLR and introduced the kids to light painting. Scarlett had the winning light-painting photo that made it past the multiple discard passes.
There was something about this image that reminded me of older snapshots. I think it’s the fact that it’s a candid moment, not perfectly sharp as Scarlett moved out of the focal plane; but it’s not out of focus - you can see that from the shirts. So when I was processing the shot, I went for an older look. I think I ended up applying a Kodachrome effect.
It was time to take some portrait shots of Scarlett. As I was getting set up, I decided that I wanted to try something new; something I’d struggled with before, but never been able to succeed at - a flash highlight of a black background. I’d seen Gavin Hooey use the technique to great success on his Adorama TV show on Youtube. But somehow I’d just never been able to get it to work well. So I decided to try and mess around with the setup before the photo shoot. Eventually, I found something that worked well for me. I think, reviewing the photos for the fifth time now, that as I have it set up, it works best for the closeup shots. For the 3/4 shots, it probably should have been either dropped a little lower or maybe pulled away from the background a bit more to spread it out a bit more. The setup looked like this:
A few days ago, I had the opportunity to ask the twins what they did that day while they were isolated from each other.
Stella: “We played LEGO and built a lot of cool things.”
Sam: “We went to Costco and then came right back home.”
Mind you, they both had the exact same day and did the exact same things. If I had to guess at why they focused on the things they did, I’d say that Sam’s answer was based on the fact that he likes to go out, especially to the park. So he was upset they’d left the house and hadn’t done anything he found fun. I’m not sure why Stella only focused on the LEGOs, but she is still playing with them a few days later, so maybe she was really happy to have new things to play with.
Over the years I’ve taken many, many photos of my kids at Coney Island. Lots of them have come out great. But I think this batch of photos is among the best photos I’ve taken of the kids at Coney Island thus far.
In some cases, it’s the expressions on the twins’ faces.
I’m on a motorcycle!
I see you!
Yeah, I know how to use this
Other times, I succeeded in getting the perfect action shot.
