Even More Holiday Photos - Our Friends, the Ropers - Off Camera Flash

This is part of a series of posts containing 2013 Holiday Photos of us, our family, and friends - We've been holding off posting these until we were sure everybody's holiday cards went out! Enjoy!

We've featured Ropers on our blog before, and we take photos with them or of them all the time. For their holiday cards this year, they wanted pictures that featured the canal behind their new house. They also wanted to try to include their pug, who is under 2 years old and still very much a puppy. She's a bit hard to keep in one spot, so that part didn't exactly work out well, haha... (she always gets exceptionally hyper when she sees us, so I am sure that didn't help)...

Jason's been dying to test out some off-camera flash techniques that we hope to use on beach portraits in the new year (hopefully I can get him to write a more technical blog post on that soon after some more experimenting), so we carted a light stand, three flashes, plus all of our other usual gear to their backyard to get it all set up. 

Then, we found out that they wanted the photos directly beside the canal, which is at the bottom of a slope, covered in pine needles and plants. Setting up the light stands and other equipment on a hill was a bit of a challenge, but we managed. We got some nice shots and were able to see how the additional lighting worked as well.

Here are some of our favorites from their session: 

In these two photos, you can clearly see the difference between using a light behind the subject and not using one. 

 

Using an additional flash from the side in addition to the on-camera flash also helps with making the subjects pop out of the background and look less "flat." The light behind the subjects lights up dark hair, etc and simulates the sun shining behind them. We still have some work to do with this (hopefully on level ground), but it went very, very well for a first attempt.

Bonus photos:

Their daughter at Lights in Bloom at Selby Gardens and visiting Santa Claus at the "North Pole" (Florida Railroad Museum).

 

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