Family Christmas Portrait... First Group Photo...

Tim Kamppinen

Hey, I haven't posted in a while, and haven't done much photography either, unfortunately, but I recently did a family portrait for some friends of mine to put on a christmas card that they sent out. I was all set to go and on the night of the shoot disaster struck when the CR2 battery in my "poverty wizard" ended up dead and I had no way to fire my flash remotely. We live in the boondocks of upper Michigan, so there was no store that sells them open or even around for 60 miles. The son, Trevor, was leaving to go back to school the next morning, so this was the only chance to get a shot of all four of them before Christmas, so I had to wing it with the ambient light. The result:


I really like it, but the major problem is that their faces are a little soft because of the 1/2 second (!) exposure and the inevitable motion blur. I'll give them credit for being able to hold still as well as they did though. I used a wide focal length (18mm on a D40) as well. I tried doing it at about 50mm first, but I ended up going with the 18mm shot because I felt like it draws the viewer into the frame and makes it seem more like you're in their home with them. It also helped to display the new fireplace that they just installed in their living room better, with a clear view of the flames, etc. In the biggest thing I did in post was add some slight vignetting to draw the attention more to the people. As far as the posing, I really had no clue and tried just tried to go with something that would look somewhat natural and that they would be able to comfortably maintain for the duration of my ridiculously long exposure.

Any comments and critiques are appreciated, especially any advice on posing groups like this for next time.

coop

What a great photo!
Geez I really like it. It has a really nice soft quality to it, and that's not bad.

Great shot.

jonh68

My obvious question is why 1/2 of a second? It looks like you could have gotten more out of the ss. What aperture and ISO were you using? While you should have gotten a higher ss, it looks like focus was on the fireplace and this caused the soft image on the family.

As far as cropping goes, I would have cropped tighter and cut off the hands of the mother, which are already clipped to begin with. Since none of the other family members have hands showing, it would balance things out and it would be a tighter shot of the family while retaining the backgrounds if that was the goal.

It's not bad, but shooting at 1/2 ss is not the way to go, regardless of the situation. It looks like there was enough light to get at least 1/10 to 1/20.

Tim Kamppinen

jonh68 wrote:

My obvious question is why 1/2 of a second? It looks like you could have gotten more out of the ss. What aperture and ISO were you using? While you should have gotten a higher ss, it looks like focus was on the fireplace and this caused the soft image on the family.

As far as cropping goes, I would have cropped tighter and cut off the hands of the mother, which are already clipped to begin with. Since none of the other family members have hands showing, it would balance things out and it would be a tighter shot of the family while retaining the backgrounds if that was the goal.

It's not bad, but shooting at 1/2 ss is not the way to go, regardless of the situation. It looks like there was enough light to get at least 1/10 to 1/20.

Well, it turns out you were right! I went back and checked the exif data and apparently it was f 3.5 at 1/10 sec and ISO 400. I don't know why I remembered it as 1/2... anyway even that apparently was too much, because they still blurred slightly. I am pretty sure that I had them in focus though... I think the fireplace being sharp is a combination of lack of motion blur with a greater depth of field because of the short focal length... I say this because the tree behind them looks just as sharp at 100% and it's obviously on a much different focal plane. Looking back I really should have bumped it up to ISO 800 or even 1600 considering that it was just meant to be printed on a 4x8" (or so) card and done some noise reduction in post. Oh well, hopefully I'll remember this the next time I'm tempted to sacrifice sharpness for the sake of a noiseless image.