Holiday Lunch

We always host Christmas Eve dinner at our house followed by Christmas Day Lunch over at my sister's. This year, I managed to set up my lights and camera for a Holiday spread photo shoot 2 hours before our scheduled lunch.

The first thing I had to do when I walked in the dinning room was to take an exposure reading.

The image below shows the room with a sliding door to the backyard and the picture taken was for exposing the room, rendering the backyard overblown.

I then decided to cover the backside of the sliding door with black cloth to get rid of the backyard issue.

The next step was to figure out the camera settings to register the lights from the chandelier and the christmas trees in the background which happended to fall on F8 1/20s ISO 320. Step three would be to set up two flashes on sticks set to 1/16 power on both sides of the room to light up the people sitting on the table. There was enough light to cover the middlle table to the end table but the front was underlit.

To fix this problem, I had to set up a front fill light using another flash head next to camera right pointing back to a white blanket behind me acting as a big bounce light. The image below shows the reflection of the blanket on the french sliding doors.

The final image was taken at F10 1/13s ISO 320 with two flash heads on each side of the room at 1/2 power pointing up the the front corners of the room. The third flash acting as a big bounce was set to 1/8 power. I cleaned up the reflection on the french doors in post production.

As a bonus post, you can check out a video of our Holiday Lunch edited by Miguel Meola.

Indian Motorcycle

Following up on my last product shot, I decided to shoot this miniature scale Indian motorcycle that measured about 10 inches long and 4 inches high and even though it wasn't chromed out, it was still highly reflective as far as light sources were concerned. For the key light, a snooted flash at 3 o'clock camera right was used to rake across the rider to show texture as seen on the rider's ribs and chest as well as the front headlights. As fill, a flash with a Lumiquest softbox was used just at immediate left of the camera. At 10 o'clock camera rear left, a flash with a snoot was used for rim lighting and additional texture as seen on the saddlebags and the rider's leg and right arm. Flash settings were at around 1/16th zoomed at 105mm. Camera settings were at about f6 @ 1/50 sec. I used f6 for a moderate focus but it looks like my 24-70 set at 70mm just won't cut it for this type of shoot. I remember focusing on the Indian logo on the gas tank thinking the focus would carry but the saddle bags, the rider's chest and face are out of focus. I'd have to shoot this again at around f11 to see if focus improves but that seems like a pretty tall order to me. Otherwise, it looks like I might have to save up for a 100mm macro.

See pullout shot for lighting setup below.