Abby and I whomped up some breakfast for Gina for Mother’s Day and served it to her in bed.
This is kind of an out take from the breakfast-in-bed photo shoot, but I had to use it because it was the 10,000th shot on my D90. The counter rolled over to 0001.
Gina’s birthday was on Saturday. (She’s doing pretty well for only being 25.) Because we went out of town for the weekend, we didn’t get to do the cake thing. And Abby loves the cake thing. On Monday, Abby and I went out and got one of those half-size birthday cakes and a bunch of candles. Abby helped Gina blow them out.
After the candles were out, Abby went to town on the cake. Well, she went to town on the icing. A little while later she said her tummy hurt and she didn’t want anymore cake.
Gina started breaking down the Christmas tree this evening and I protested, saying we hadn’t shot our annual family Christmas portrait. I use “annual” loosely here. So I got all my pitchure takin’ junk out. In hindsight, it would have been better to think of this earlier in the season. I would have shaved and worn a decent shirt and we would have combed Abby’s hair.
Abby’s Mimi got Abby a Snow White camping set for her birthday. The set has a sleeping bag, tent, backpack and water bottle. Gina set up the tent today and Abby loved it. Abby found it hysterical when Gina would hit the inside of the tent and make it billow out. It gave me a chance to practice a little Strobistry. A put one flash inside the tent at 1/8 power pointed at Gina’s face and another flash with the umbrella reflector outside the tent at full power pointed at Abby. I think it turned out pretty well.
Today’s Strobist lesson, kids, is light restriction. I made a free cardboard snoot about 11 inches long to fit over my flash head and throw a narrow beam of light. (Gina cracked up when I told her it was called a snoot. She cracked up further when she surveyed the dining room and saw my myriad homemade pitcher-taking accessories.) I was a little surprised at just how narrow my snoot made the beam. It made a rectangle of about 2 feet by 1 foot on he wall when shot from about 7 feet away.
The point of the exercise is to see how light restriction affects your photographs. You can see here the light hits the side of Gina’s face and falls off quickly at the top of her forehead. It falls off quickly at the bottom, too, but that’s off camera in this shot. She was sitting inches from the wall, but by shooting from about 45 degrees from the flash, the area of the wall the light actually hit is out of the shot.
I made the same shot of the Abe Lincoln bust I bought for $15 at the charity e-mail auction held at the office. Abe has been a patient photographic subject, but he’s all coppery colored and I don’t really like the actual photos of him. The real Lincoln wasn’t all that photogenic, either.
