Sometime before Christmas my friend Steve asked me to snap some quick shots of himself, his girlfriend and his girlfriend’s daughter for use on a Christmas Card. The first question that arises in this situation, in my head, is location. I do have lights, but I don’t think Steve was thinking of a studio-look shot. So we need to go find a Christmas-y outdoors location. We settled on a park. It was a nice day, so I headed there early to grab some shots beforehand.
Thing is, I’ve been to this park a few times, so there weren’t a whole lot of shots I didn’t already have, especially in the area we had selected. But that forces me to look around more, which is a good thing(tm). I picked up a shot or two of reflections in water, because I have a thing for reflections in water. And a dead tree presented itself. But then Steve showed up and we started work on the Christmas Card shot.
I have very little experience taking pictures of people, but I’ve seen quite a few Christmas Card shots. So I set about recreating that. Because of the relationships between the subjects I decided a Tallest-to-Shortest ordering (rather than Tallest-in-the-Middle) was appropriate, so we did that. I found it difficult to find angles which looked natural but didn’t have things growing out of a subject’s head or shoulders. The shot that ended up being the winner was the three lying down on a blanket, on their stomachs looking at the camera. Add a bit of bokeh and voila, Christmas Card shot.
Steve’s girlfriend’s daughter is involved in some sort of modelling thing, and required a head shot. I took a few random shots while waiting for Steve to retrieve things from the car. They selected one of those shots to be the one she uses for her head shot, which was flattering.
Nothing new learned from this excursion. Getting more comfortable posing people and telling subjects what to do (or, suggesting, rather).
