The Festive- and Holiday season always brings some new shoots – with lights, and stuff that shines and sparkle, and the looming vacation many of us in South Africa gets to have during December. I was able to do such a sweet, and cute Christmas shoot recently with a lovely baby girl.
I had the idea to use the Christmas lights as background which seemed to be a little tricky as well. You learn many things along the way, and how to use the lights in a form of bokeh behind or in front of someone take the right kind of setup. In a narrow room I was able to add the lights as background, with baby about a good three meters away from them.
With my Fujifilm X-T2, I paired the amazing 56mm, and opened it right up to 1.2 for stunning depth of field. The huge amount of depth, with the distance between our little girl and the lights strung on stands at the back, made for glistening lights, and a magical effect, all suited for Christmas. To have a lens that opens up so much for you enables you to just take your photography to a different level. You understand focus more, not just in the sharpness of a subject but in understand where to draw the eye, that having a particular something in focus, and the rest not, has so much more impact.
Lights are known what exactly what they do, and with fairy lights, you can literally play. A couple of boxes of those, not even hectically expensive, gave a great effect. With the Elinchrom location kit I was able to get some flashes, and then we had some baby portraits no mom could resist. To get her to smile was about the hardest part. 🙂
This shoot was very special, as any Christmas shoot should be, but I am glad for the stunning, yet so simple setup we could create for this very cute little girl.