Superhero Lincoln
Superhero Lincoln, originally uploaded by @lifebypixels.
Via Flickr:
Well I felt the need to upload something that makes me happy. Of late I have been inundated with too many projects, etc. Work, both professional and personal, has been kicking my butt. Long hours, lots of travel, decisions on the fly, etc. But it's true that I'm not unhappy about it, better busy than bored is my philosophy. Also, I'm extremely thankful to be in a position to have such "problems".
So with all that in mind, one recent little fun side project we did was a photoshoot with my son. This was for his first birthday invitation. We're doing a superhero themed party and my wife went all out. She bought material and looked up some things online which resulted in her making this cape and bracelets. It doesn't hurt that she married a guy who grew up reading LOTS of comics as well. We went to a local park in downtown Austin, found a great angle where you could see the city skyline in the background and proceeded to play in the grass. This was just prior to him starting to crawl so it was fairly easy to manage. :)
We shot this in mid afternoon, but thankfully there was a massive tree with very wide branches and lots of foliage that offered us a great shady spot. This gave me more opportunity to dial down the exposure to get the nice blue skies and use a single barebulb flash, my nikon SB800 wide left off camera. It was about 3' to my left and firing at a level around 6" above ground. I rested it on the diaper bag. Not pro, but it works. The flash was set to a wide value so I could get plenty of fill, but firing laterally versus down insured I didn't get harsh vertical shadows and casts on the grass. I've found this compliments the shadows produced by ambient light and gives me some more flexibility when mixing light sources together.
I was super happy with how it came out, and so was my wife. Now we just have to actually throw the party.
Twitter: @lifebypixels