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My New Studio February 24, 2010

Posted by Emily in : Family, Little Man Dallin, My Handsome Husband, Photography, Princess Hannah , 8comments

I know.

You can smell Dallin’s adorable face through your monitor.  :)

I shot this image of him in my new studio, in the garage.

Well, first let me back up.  I’m a student at AAU and I’m taking a class this semester called “Quality of Light.”

Sounds easy, right?

Turns out, it’s been a very complex studio class for me so far.

Basically, I knew nothing about light a few weeks ago.  Well, nothing about how to shoot in artificial light.

I had to order a bunch of studio equipment for my class, and now, I have a studio.

I still don’t know how to use everything, and when to use everything, but I’m learning.

And THANK GOODNESS David doubles as a computer/technical equipment geek because who would I direct all my geeky questions to if it weren’t for him? Plus, he can set up my studio and take it down in record time.  Maybe I should hire him to work for me for free as my go-to guy?  Oh, wait . . . he already does that.

This is my temporary studio for now . . .

It’s in the garage.  :)

I ordered everything from B&H and let me tell you, that is a very dangerous place for me to shop.   I could easily drop a lot of money there.

This is my assistant Hannah.  She is turning out to be quite the photographer herself.  She has her own director’s chair, and when my twin, Brian, lent her an ear, she told him all about the white umbrellas and the diffused light I was trying to produce to shoot his product.  (OK, so she may not have said that.)

I have black and white back drops.  My back drop is huge.  Let’s just say I was more than “shocked” when UPS dropped off my back drop paper.

I did several product shots for my brother Brian, (who’s launching something very exciting) and I hope to share a few images with you soon!

Since it was so much work for me to watch my husband set this up, I thought I would take a few pics of the kids before letting him take it down.

Hannah is wearing all of her most prized possessions: ballet shots, crazy tights, leotard, a skirt that twirls, and her favorite umbrella from my friend Cheryl who brought it all the way from Singapore for her when she visited last month.

Tigger is Dallin’s most prized possession.

And together, they can’t hold still for less than 1/60 of a second.  :)  On a side note: kids should never be photographed at less than 1/60 of second.  They are just too busy and inevetebly, you will get motion blur (the unintentional kind that looks sloppy and not artistic).  To photograph this, I set my shutter speed to 1/60 of a second and took a light reading from my Sekonic light meter to find out which aperture I should be shooting with.  (Never, I repeat, NEVER trust your in-camera light meter to give you an accurate reading.  It doesn’t see the whole picture and it can give you some pretty sad results.  More on that in a later tutorial.)  It said I should shoot at 2.8 (which is a very shallow depth of field – DOF) so that ‘s what I did.  If you’ll notice, the images of the kids by themselves turned out fine, but when you examine the images with both kids together, you will notice that Dallin is more in focus than Hannah (because of the shallow DOF) and in the future, I’m going to have to use strobe lights to get the lighting to the point where I can set my aperture where I need it to be (when shooting more than one person you should have your aperture set to at least F8 or higher so there’s not a chance of someone dropping out of focus when it’s not intended.) and keep my shutter at 1/60 as the slowest speed.

With that said, Dallin has had it.  No more photos, and no more talk about f-stops and apertures!