The Barn Sessions April 2010

I've enjoyed using the college studio and helping during colleague's photo shoots. My 'home studio' set up has proved to have very good natural light and the neutral blue background wall works well with the borrowed Bowens lights as well as with controlled daylight and reflectors. The problems arise on cloudy windy days when exposures can vary wildly, but generally it's proved convenient and relatively relaxing.

My first theme is 'My Family and Other Animals' and I wanted to photograph my three nieces all together.  We have a barn which is used mainly for storage, there is a lime washed wall which I thought would make a great background if we cleared the space and tidied up a bit. During an afternoon with a trip to the tip and the help of my brother in law, we moved a hay trailer and swept up.

I took care to place the lighting cables out of the way and instructed the girls to take care. We used a checked extension cable with a mains cut out in line. There are exterior grade mains plugs in the brick building next door. Camera equipment, sync, tripod etc is as described previously.

Using my Sekonic light meter I was able to adjust and balance the lights to give good light onto the bench and reduced background shadows. As shown white, reflecting umbrellas gave diffuse soft light. Angling them to point downwards reduces shadows behind the sitters.
These trousers have padded knees are are great for this and gardening.

Laura (oldest) arrived first and we took a variety of pictures, sitting, standing. She's not as comfortable being photographed as the other 2, but she was more relaxed once we got going.

The 2 other monkeys were delayed on an urgent shopping trip, but arrived eventually and got changed. I'd asked them to all wear white tops and fortunately the barn was quite warm on that afternoon.

Adding 3 into the mix makes for difficult photography. I've found your odds of getting a decent combination of expressions diminish drastically and casting shadows between heads adds more to think about. Thank goodness for digital!

The advantages are that they are all at ease in close contact with each other and the interactions help to relax them. They had seen previous picture that I'd taken and were willing subjects. I checked the exposures on screen and changed around with positions.
Image Selection
For now I'm shooting in Fine/Large .jpg and NEF (Nikon Raw) this makes for very large files and I've had to upgrade my PC to cope with this amount of data. For this reason I check my images on the screen of the camera and delete any that have eyes closed etc. or obvious unchangeable faults. I upload my images from the SD card onto my PC using the Nikon soft wear as in the above screen shot, naming and dating the folder. The PC is backed up regularly and have a separate portable hard drive to store the images to bring to college.
First look through and anything I like the look of I give 1 star rating, then I look through again and give 2 or 3 stars to the best. I've found it's well worth looking at all the picture on a different day too and getting other opinions.