Day 19, Family Portrait

Day 19, Family Portrait, originally uploaded by solostandfound.

What a chaotic night! If you saw my post a few days back on my brother, Andrew, you had the chance to read that I bought a studio light set up and a backdrop. I seem to always aim much higher then I should. For my first song on the guitar, I wanted Clapton or Stevie Ray Vaughn. Talk about over my head. Clapton has these monster mutant long fingers, and I still haven't got one song down on what are now a collection of 3 guitars. They look great hung on my wall in my office. I have since backed it down a little and I am working on Johnny Cash stuff now.

For my first studio type portrait, I tried to shoot 23 people (half of them are kids) with a brand new set up and next to no time to work out the bugs. Did I say half of them were kids? So I made some big errors and I am not happy with the portraits. I am working out some fixes with photoshop, but just the same, it was as big a let down as not being able to pick up a guitar and drop Claptonesque riffs.

While I had everything set up, I ran each family through and shot some other pics for fun. I like how these came out. For next time, I will move the subjects forward a little and put up a backdrop light or hair light. I will make sure the backdrop is ironed. That was really an easy fix in iPhoto. Just a little of the retouch tool. I will hook up my camera to a laptop and then I will catch lighting problems in the first few shots. I will.... well the list is kinda long. But the individual family groups were not bad. Here is the "funny" shot that I have done some of the editing on. (the backdrop was about 2 feet to small on the sides and about 5 feet too small in the front - a lot of photoshop to fill in and make look natural)

Here below are the shots of my parents, my brothers and their wives and children and my sister and her husband and children. Clicking on any of them will take you to my Flickr photostream and you can see them in larger formats there.
I just can't wait to try again.

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Camera:	Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi
Exposure:	0.02 sec (1/50)
Aperture:	f/5.6
Focal Length:	28 mm
ISO Speed:	100
Exposure Bias:	0/3 EV