Whirling Dervish

I convinced some other people to let me inflict my hobby on them.

My buddy Jim has a 4-year-old son for whom the word active does not do justice. He dashes around from room to room and toy to toy like the Tasmainian Devil. Not even his dad can get him to stay still for very long. So it tok some doing to get them together in just the right spot for the flashes to work properly. I wanted to capture a tender moment between the two of them, but Brayden doesn’t really go in for tender moments.

He did sit with his dad for a fairly extended period while he fired Nerf bullets at me. I thought the camera would make a decent shield for my face, but I took three or four direct hits to my forehead. We had a lot of fun and I eventually put the camera down, grabbed the other Nerf gun and let him have it.

The closest we got to a tender moment was when Brayden sustained a pretty good rug burn on his pinkie toe and dissolved into tears in his dad’s arms.

Strobist info: SB 600 into silver umbrella camera left at 1/8 power for most shots and 1/16 for a few and a snooted SB 26 camera right and behind the boys for a hair/rim light. They moved around so much that the hair light didn’t always hit the right spots. ISO 200 and f/2.8 for most shots.

Jim’s house has this great fake fireplace that makes me think of old Mexico. It was once brick but he covered that with some white adobe stuff. I thought it would make an excellent background, but after seeing the pics I’m not sure. The alternating light and dark bother me. I wanted to make the background go even darker, but I guess we weren’t far enough away from it and I didn’t control the light spill good enough.