Both of my grandsons celebrate their birthdays in December so we decided to do the shoot at the studio this year, combining the usual birthday portrait of each little guy with the Christmas card photo of both. The boys showed up sporting cool little neckties, with shirts untucked, and baggy jeans, "in style." The session was very loose, as you can tell. They posed at first, and later ran, played, and opened birthday gifts. Lots of fun was had by all. I was lucky to get the "hug." It lasted only a moment and was gone, but it captures their relationship and personalities perfectly. The final photograph was finished in black and white. Click on any image to enlarge.
For the technically minded, I like to keep it simple, especially for kids. All of these were either shot with flash or window light. I used two soft box flash units, one on the white background sweep and the other feathered camera right. There is a large white wall camera left that softens the shadows. the exposure was f/ 9 at 1/125 of a second. The exposure for the bright window lighted image of the two boys was f/13 at 1/80 of a second, a risky shutter speed for these two moving targets. Camera was Canon 6D for all.
