The Lands at Hillside Farms is tucked into the Back Mountain area, just west of Wilkes-Barre, and is a working dairy farm/ice cream parlor/greenhouse/reception site/several other things.  What’s great about it is that it’s open to the public – the folks who run it don’t mind if you poke your head into the barn to see the cows, or if you walk out back to watch the chickens.  In fact, they encourage it!

I’ve stopped there on a number of summer evenings for a dish of ice cream and some shooting along the creek.  It’s quite lovely, with nor shortage of images to be made.  And now there’s baby animals!

We took Mandy’s little sister with us and did an hour-long tour of the farm.  We saw chickens and sheep, we visited the odd-looking goose by the creek, and we took a bunch of photos of Mandy and Breanna running about and doing the sisters thing.

And then we went to the barn to see the goats!

If you’ve never seen a baby goat, then take my work for it, they’ve just about the cutest thing you can imagine.  You really just want to pick them up and cuddle – and from what I hear, the goats like it.  Sadly, they stayed in their pen this time, so I had to content myself with shooting in over the railing.

As you might expect, shooting in a barn presents challenges.  Barns aren’t known for being well lit, or often times, being barely lit at all.  This one was no exception – we’ve got some goats in a corner pen, and the only light is what comes in through the open barn doors.  This is f/1.8 territory, ISO 800 & 1/40.  With the fixed 50mm, which isn’t quite long enough part of the time, the trick is to shoot a bunch, keep the sharpest frames, and crop in.

So the conditions were challenging, but it was worth it.  We stayed with the goats for a while, then stopped to see the cows, and then had to head for home.  Breanna didn’t want to leave and was quite vocal about it; frankly, I don’t blame her.  I’m hard pressed to think of a better way to spend an Easter afternoon than on the farm.

That lasted until an hour before we left, when I ended up packing the backpack with the aforementioned, plus some.  And by the end, 4GB of photos.

What changed?  After all, it’s only Easter – and while I’m really not sure how other people celebrate Easter, for me it’s an afternoon spent with my girlfriend and her family, eating too much and lounging around.  It’s not the most interesting subject matter, so after you get through a few shots of the little kids in their Easter outfits, everything is pretty low key.

And all went as planned at our first stop; Mandy’s little sister in her lovely Easter dress stole the show, I started shooting with the 17-35L and printing from my PoGo in between.  Then the cousins joined in, and then everybody wanted a shot for Facebook, and I actually kept pretty busy with the camera in hand.  Especially when the party moved outside for some baseball!

We ended the day with Mandy’s mom’s side of the family: I swapped out for the telephoto here and shot on the deck, where everyone was enjoying the nice weather.  They struck up a game of bean-bag toss, so I got some shots of that as well.  Nothing too complex, just fun stuff, natural lighting.

This is what holiday photos are all about, to me.  I’m not interested in having a ton of snapshots, or photos of the food spread, or a posed group portrait.  It’s more fun just to keep a little chronicle of the day, let things flow as they will and capture a moment here and there, when they’re worth capturing.

What happened between the two family get togethers?  Well, that’s the surprise that caused the change in my original plans – and you’ll have to check back tomorrow to read about it.  Suffice to say, it involves a lot of Easter cuteness.

The goal is to get in, setup, and be ready and waiting by the time they’re all there so we can get them into position, arranged by families within the group, and shoot the thing before anyone starts to burn out.  Then we can disperse them to relax and do smaller family shots, without the tension of keeping everybody “on deck.”

The last time they had a group shot done, they all wore black and white, shot against a white wall, and processed the prints as B&W.  It’s a look that they like, so we’re recreating it this time.  The background will be a large off-white wall in the house, which I’ll blast to white and adjust in post.

Lighting will be in the form of a pair of Speedlites with shoot-through umbrellas, high up on the stands and shooting across the group, one from each side, with some feathering.  To keep everyone sharp, I’m going to need a small f-stop, f/8 or f/11, although the properties of a wide-angle lens will help maintain DOF.  The trick is to light everyone nicely, without head shadows, so between the umbrellas and the aperture, I’ll need to push out a lot of light – I wouldn’t be surprised if the Speedlites fire at half or even full power.

I’ll be using the 7D and shooting RAW, but I’ll have the Picture Style set to monochrome; it won’t affect the RAW file at all, but the preview image is always a JPEG, and will display in B&W with that setting, which will let me get an idea how the final photo will look after conversion.  Since we’re working in a confined space I’ll be using the 17-40mm L.

In a perfect world I’d be able to get a third Speedlite in behind the group, to both kick up the white wall and add some separation between it and the group.  I doubt I’ll have enough room for that here, so what I may do instead is put it camera-center on the boom stand and crank it down from overhead as a fill/booster.

Anytime that you’re working in a fixed space with a large group, you end up with two primary variables.  The first is, of course, the people – if you’ve got a good crowd that’s having fun with the process, your life is easy.  Happy people make good photos, whereas a group of people who’d rather not be there will look that way.  The second variable is the room; even when they tell you it will be a fairly open space, you can count on having to move photos off the walls, furniture out of the way, and distracting knick-knacks from the mantle.  It’s Murphy’s Law that there will always be a sofa in the exact spot you need to place a lightstand, so the trick is to come prepared – Justin Clamps, booms, and when all else fails, Voice-Activated Lightstands (also known as assistants).

In theory, this should be a straight-forward gig.  Hopefully reality plays out that way!

And sometimes, reality kind of stinks.

Take 2 of the family Xmas portraits involved doing them for my girlfriend’s family.  If you’ll remember, the concept was a good one; cycle people through a nice living room scene with a good lighting setup, and make some really nice group images.  That was the theory.

Reality turned out to be quite different.  Due to a breakdown in communication between the multiple planners on their side, and my girlfriend (not sure why they didn’t just call me directly?), they were expecting us to arrive 30 minutes before the time we had written down.  So needless to say, tempers were flaring, small children were burnt out already, and instead of a calm, orderly studio environment, I stepped into an outer ring of Dante’s Inferno.

Unexpected good weather made the family decide they wanted outdoor photos instead, but strong wind gusts and the sudden lack of a dedicated assistant made an off-camera Speedlite and umbrella impossible.  So I slapped the 580EX onto the 7D, dialed in a fill-flash compensation, and away we went, with each family picking their own backyard location.

Some of the shots went pretty well – this group let me work them into a band of shade, and while the lighting is still not very much sculpted, it does get the job done pretty well.

Others didn’t go as well as I would have liked.  The extreme dynamic range here means that even with the fill, the highlights are running too hot and the shadows block up.  Simply put, there’s too much contrast.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a terrible shot, it’s just not what I’d like to have made.

Ironically, that same issue results in a lack of contrast here.  The group opted for the shade to avoid the squinting problem, but put the sunlit backyard behind them, creating an over-contrast issue.  To solve that issue, I applied a Shadow/Highlight layer in Photoshop, which helped create some semblance of balance, but ate up too much contrast.  Suffice to say, this was a post-processing intensive set of images, and I’m not nearly as happy with them as I’d like to have been.

The only two that I am pleased with are these, taken of my girlfriend’s immediate family – her little sister suffered complete burnout at the original setting, so we went home to their house to finish their portraits.  Finally able to step back into a studio setup, I was able to setup a single Speedlite off-camera w/ and umbrella to create these:

I like this first one for the darker overall quality.  Originally I had wanted to merge it with a second shot, one taken at a longer exposure with the tree aglow, but my PS skills aren’t really up to that challenge, and more importantly, I don’t like doing things that way in the first place.  I’d rather get it right in camera (which was not going to happen due to an unhappy 4 year old).

The final image was even simpler; the same single Speedlite positioned high and almost directly in front of the subjects, just in front of me.  And I’ll even admit, believe it or not, that I used Live View to get this shot – it was the only way to see when little sister’s eyes were open and looking at me, since through the viewfinder I couldn’t always tell (the lights were dim from the last shot, still).

In a perfect world, I’d have been able to stick with the theory and gone with the well-planned studio setup.  Or at the very least, had the time and help to use and off-camera Speedlite outdoors.  But given the way things went down, the pictures were still taken – and that’s the main thing.

The reality of this shoot turned out to be much like the theory; it was a three-light setup, with the main and fill lights set to a 2:1 ratio. For the BG light (light C), I added a +1/3 FEC. This washed out the color a bit more than I would have liked, but it made the BG pop. I kept light C zoomed to 14mm with the diffuser panel down for as much spread as possible.

The overall turnout was about what the school and I had hoped for, and the folks who did come seemed excited, and I had good time myself. In retrospect, having more room between myself and the BG would have been better; my A & B lights spilled onto the BG more than I would have liked. A greater distance between the two lighting areas (A+B and C) would keep them from intermingling, which is something I’ll keep in mind for next time.

I’m also fascinated by the portable, popup backgrounds I’m seeing other photogs use. I’ll have to investigate them, as they appear to be just the right size for a single person, or small group, to fit on, and they are apparently very portable. That could end up working better for the next time around, since it would let me pull C light away from the BG and use it instead as a hair light.

At the end of the day we didn’t get rich, but we made enough so that after the split, there’s a good chunk ready to be donated in the school’s name to a family Christmas charity. And that’s the part that really counts – the school’s families got to make a memory, and in the process help other area families during the holidays.

The setup is going to be in the living room of an aunt & uncle’s house, where the couch is in front of some large picture windows that look out into the back yard. It’s a nice setting, with good natural light, and the room is long enough (it stretches into the kitchen area) that I can get sufficient distance from the subjects to shoot without having to worry about using my widest angle, and then battling distortions.

The original plan called for a portrait of all the youngin’s, but that quickly grew (as these things tend to do) to include addition portraits of each family group. And I fully expect that once we’re there on-site, it will evolve to include some of those wacky family portraits that happen when everyone gets a bit goofy. Frankly, it ought to be a lot of fun, which equates to the lower stress level. On the other hand, this is a group that I simply have to impress – even more than the regular clients, due to the personal stakes. The stress meter goes back up!

Kidding aside, this should be a straight-forward shoot. I’ll be using essentially the same lighting setup from the first batch of Christmas portraits at the school; A & B lights in a 2:1 ratio, setup up stands with shoot-through umbrellas. C light is a bit trickier, since the BG this time is the wall/windows of the room. I can either stick it in a corner behind them, angled in for some hair light, or perhaps even stick it outside the window, shooting through the glass.

It’s the glass that will provide the most challenge – controlling reflections will be the primary struggle. In a large studio space this might not be so difficult, but in a living room, placement of lights is limited by the physical layout. Still, I’m sure that everything will fall into place.

I plan on using the 7D (to control the lights) and the 28-135mm. The length of the room should let me zoom a bit, compressing the scene somewhat.

At the top of my list of holiday loathing is the ever-present, annual Christmas photo cards. (Least this sound hypocritical after my last post, let me explain; the Family Christmas Photos I just did are a special community/charity event. That’s fine. It’s my OWN family’s photo card that I hate doing.) 

I have to wonder if other photographers have the same experience I do, which generally includes my mother remembering that she wants the photo taken, say, 5 minutes before I’m supposed to get in the car and drive 300 miles home after Thanksgiving. Yes, that would be after the gear is already packed. It also includes rounding up the rest of the family – all 3 of them, if you include the cat, and we usually do – followed by some complaints about their current attire, a short argument about what said attire should be modified to, stomping up the stairs to go change the attire (or in my case, digging yet another bag out of the trunk), and finally assembling the now-completely-pissed-off crowd in the living room and telling them to smile (while my brother holds the cat, who would rather claw his face off than be present for another of these sessions).

Yeah, right. At this point, I’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell of making a photo that doesn’t look like the people in it are about to go for each other’s throats.

It’s the old self-timer & dash method, everybody grits their teeth as the strobes go off, and after a couple of frames the subjects mutiny and leave. Repack the gear, repack the trunk, assure mom that the picture will come out fine, and hit the road.

I spent the next 300 miles trying not to thing about the festering image on my flash card. And how next year, I’d like to hog-tie everyone in Christmas lights, stuff a bow in their mouth, and really have a memorable photo.

What it’s going to look like is this: it’s your typical elementary school gym, not too big, poorly lit, with a performance stage at the far end. My plan is to setup on the stage, which will lift me up away from the gym floor. Because let’s face it, it’s a gym and there’s going to be kids running around, so having lightstands and gear in a separate location is just safer.

For a backdrop I’ll have a lengths of white paper stretched on ropes between two volleyball posts. This is the school’s idea, the way they create backdrops for plays and performances, and it works out well since my BG stands and paper would never be able to accommodate large groups of people. And since these are going to be head & shoulder portraits, I don’t need a floor to ceiling BG.

As for adding some punch to the BG, I’ve considered several ideas. Originally there was talk of Christmas props being included, but that fell through. Then I flirted with the idea of using a projector to create a BG, but I’m not sure I can balance the projected light with the strobe lights and have it come out. So what I’m finally settling on is using a single BG light, aimed at the paper and gelled, to provide a splash of light and color that will spice it up a bit.

The subjects themselves will be lit by two lights, your standard 45/45 lighting setup, with shoot-through umbrellas. It’s simple, clean, and effective. Since I’m shooting all wireless now with the 7D acting as a commander, it’ll be easy to plug in a lighting ratio for the main and fill lights (groups A & B). This setup works best with a subtle ratio, probably 2:1 or less, with the BG light as group C, dialed up to exposure comp. +1 or so.

(Part of what I enjoy about this kind of work is right here, the conceptualization process that happens before the gear even comes out of the bag. A lot of folks starting out get all wrapped up in the numbers because that’s what seems to be important, especially when some jerk like me is quoting them off the top of my head like this. But the fact is, it’s a familiarity with the gear that lets me imagine what the numbers might be, and I’ll often come close. But I’m not fixating on them – if I start shooting and fine out that I really needed a 4:1 ratio with group C at +2.66, then I’ll make the adjustments and get back to shooting, never worrying for a moment that I “got the numbers wrong.” It doesn’t matter. What matters is that the image works. Knowing what the numbers might be just helps you narrow down the correct formula faster than a blind guess-&-check method.)

The downside to this kind of gig? Make no mistakes, there’s an assembly line element to it. I have, at most, 3 hours to shoot portraits of all the families who arrive. That may be 4 or it may be 40. In any gig, there’s a trade-off required. This time the trade-off is creativity in return for efficiency. I simply cannot afford to re-light every group that comes up on stage in a new and creative way (no matter how much fun it would be). We’d be there all night, and the cookies and hot chocolate simply won’t last that long.

With everything setup and tuned in, I could shoot a portrait every minute, no problem – several frames each, since someone will inevitably blink. But take into account the time it takes to get the next group up on stage, positioned in front of the BG, all adjusted and smiling, then cleared out, and I’m thinking that 1 group each five minutes will be a success. That figures to about 15 groups an hour, realistically, and probably 250 shots for the night. That’s a couple of nights worth of editing, done asap to get the images into the print lab’s system, ordered, and shipped before the holidays.

Specifically, we have very few MEANINGFUL shots of the people we love.  Oh, we all have a few hundred unsorted snapshots from Christmas and birthdays and the 4th of July – but how many meaningful, well-made, emotional portraits do you have?

I know that I don’t have nearly enough.  In my time as a photographer, I have taken exactly one meaningful shot of my mother (which I mentioned in my Valentine’s Day portrait post).  I have one meaningful shot of my girlfriend, and one of my best friend, both of which are candids taken almost by accident.  I don’t have a single meaningful shot of my father or my brother.  Nor of my grandparents.

This doesn’t seem right to me.  I’ve spent countless hours around these people with a camera.  I’ve had them in the same room as my studio setup.  I’ve even practiced lighting techniques on them while they’ve been doing homework or paying bills – so why in the world haven’t I ever asked them to take 15 minutes for a really nice portrait?

I don’t really know the answer to that.  I have plenty of excuses, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve missed opportunities.

I bring this up because twice now I’ve read posts by other photographers who have waited to take portraits of their loved ones, and ended up waiting too long.

Check out Zach Arias’ thoughts on the subject, and the portraits that it spurred him into making.  I’ve mentioned Zach before; he’s an excellent photographer and keeps up a great blog that covers everything from the technicals to ideas like this.

And definitely check out Days with My Father, a photo essay by Philip Toledano about his aging father, who no longer has a short term memory.  It’s an emotional set of images, and one of the best photo essays I’ve yet seen.

MAKE PORTRAITS OF THE PEOPLE YOU LOVE.  Make them in window light of the person’s favorite room; make them outside at their favorite spot; make them in the studio against a backdrop.  Whatever you do, just make the portraits while you still have the opportunity.

I know I will.