Mini Christmas

So Christmas and New Years has past, and you know what that means. House cleaning and reorganizing...yay.

So while my dad, Victor, and I were switching around the whole living room, I noticed a miniature christmas tree sitting in a equally small pool of light. It seemed like such a perfect picture, so I ran and grabbed my camera.

The first few pictures weren't quite right. I was using too open of an aperture and from too high of an angle. This gave an exceptionally shallow depth of field that didn't do the tree justice. Here's the results here...

Stopping down (using a smaller aperture) helped out a lot and brought almost the whole tree and presents into focus, but still kept the background in soft focus. I love how the blueish light from reflection off the deck mixed with the warm tones of the wood blend together behind the tree. I left the full sized christmas lights in the background to play with scale a bit. So here's the finished product.

In the first picture, there was just the light from the sun illuminating the tree. In the final picture I added some fill light with....an envelope. Sounds funny but it was actually quite effective. Being white, the envelope reflected a lot of light and filled in some of the darker shadows on the back of the tree. This allowed me to put the sun directly behind the tree for some rim lights to help separate. The envelope, being long and skinny, shaped the light to fill the whole tree and not just a small, circular area. 

Camera setting are: f4, ISO 200, 1/80. Shot on a 7D with my 50mm. I normally like to shoot at ISO 100 but to get the f4 I had to bump it up a stop so that my shutter wouldn't fall to much and induce some blur from shake. Rule of thumb is to never shoot at a shutter speed lower than your focal length. i.e. 1/50 with a 50mm, 1/250 with a 250mm. 

I held the envelope reflector off to camera right as the sun was a little on the left side of the frame so shadows would be on the right of the tree more than the left. The goal was to fill in the shadows a bit. 

In Lr I added some saturation to the tree as well as bumped the clarity up a bit. Over the whole image I over saturated the reds, oranges, and blues. I toned the shadows a little reddish as well to warm it up. 

So there you have it, a mini christmas tree. See you tomorrow.