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Want to try Portraits of My Children
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Hi Folks. I have this idea of trying to shoot a portrait of my children and getting it developed and mounted on canvas.
I am very much a novice here but I’m willing to give it a try out. It hopefully will be a learning experience if nothing else come out of it. My Kit consists I have a D70s with an SB800 and I have a Nikkor 18-70mm kit Lens and Sigma 55-200mm AF F4-5.6 DC. I’m on here to seek advice in how I could set up a cheap and temporary home studio, do I need some form of studio lighting or can I get away with using the SB800 maybe as an accesory flash and the built in flash as the master. I may be looking to do too much here taking into account my inexperience. What I want to achieve is to have a meduim size canvas (A2 size) in black and white of two small children sitting against a white backdrop. If some of you guys have any suggestions and are able to give me some direction on this I would be very much in appreciation.Damian
LetterkennySorry Damian, I can’t offer any advice on studio set ups as I’ve never done it and to be honest it doesn’t interest me yet. What I can suggest though is to get the children to bring out their characters and not necessarily in a clinical pose or studio. I’ve had photographs taken, the usual family poses, by a professional in the past but none compare to an image I took myself of my own lads on a bench really giving me abuse and faces. The characters all come out in them and they weren’t asked to pose, hold, smile, stay still, etc. I found this to create an image with more appeal and more energy…and it takes pride of place in my sitting room printed in A2.
Alan
I agree with Alan. I suggest that you work with natural light either outdoors or indoors (windowlight is wonderful) and don’t worry too much about having a white background. If you really want a white background, simply drape some light diffusion material over your window, put your kids in front of that and get a large reflector in front of them to bounce light back into them. If you expose correctly for them, your background (the windowlight), will overexpose to white. It’s simply a case of balancing your main and background exposure. An incident lightmeter would be useful here but not essential. Other than that, why not go for some lifestyle type images.
Here are some resources that you will find useful:
– How to photograph children on locations (this is a PDF file, so right-click on it and select Save As)
– How to shoot natural light inddor portraits (this is a PDF file, so right-click on it and select Save As)
– Lighting Essentials has some great information on using Natural Light, Studio Lighting and Portable Lighting.
Armed with the information in these resources you should have more than enough info to make a good head start. The rest is down to you.
As Alan and Thorsten have said….try and have your children in as natural an environment as possible, if you want relaxed and natural looking shots.
Personally I’ve found the best shots come when the child has stopped thinking about the camera altogether…they can be real hams as I’m sure you’ll know :wink:
Spend a little while chatting/playing with them…maybe show them the camera…let them fiddle around with it..carefully of course!!
Then what I like to do is engage them in conversation about something they enjoy while you are shooting..keep talking as you shoot and hopefully you’ll end up with some lovely shots.
As the lads said…natural window light works great if you have a fast lens…f2.8 or lower. The 50mm 1.8 is great for this and cheap.
Hope that helps.
Robbie
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