This is from a recent shoot of my kids and their cousins. You may not believe it from this picture, but my kids were complete pains during the whole shoot!! I’m not saying they didn’t have fun but it is almost impossible to shoot (or not to want to shoot!!) six kids when 3.75 of them are showing off, being silly, wiggling, rolling eyes and pulling faces constantly… for three and a half hours! Maybe I could hire them out as some sort of patience-endurance training team or something! Anyway, Nephew and Niece were Angels! Mine behaved as though they were out on a weekend pass.
This photo shoot taught me many things. A few of the most important are listed below.
The first is a very techincal one. Never, EVER forget to check your ISO when you are using studio lights… Just don’t. every 450 odd shots could possibly have an incredible amout of noise in them… and I don’t mean the kind of noise kids make. GRRRRRRRRR! I thought my lights were acting kinda funky and over exposing everything… I had to second guess them as my light meter wouldn’t give me correct exposure. Well, it couldn’t. The meter was set for ISO 100 and the Camera was at 1600. Double GRRRRR!
The second thing I learned… You should always be wearing protective head gear when you discover you have made such an elementary mistake on a shoot. Especially when it was a shoot that sucked you so dry.
The third very useful lesson I learned was how to use auto-align in Photoshop. What you see here is actually a composite of four different pictures. I will brush up on this new skill but you have to know this PS tool is amazing!
The forth and final thing this shoot taught me was… It’s probably not a bad idea to carry a hip flask of Scotch next time I’m doing a 3+ hour shoot with my own children!!
