Christmas

Poinsettia in front of the tree.

What would Christmas be without taking a family portrait?  Who knows how many more Christmas' we will have with all the kids home together?  What better setting than in front of the fireplace with the Christmas stockings all hung and the Christmas tree nearby?  This shot was taken with my Nikon D750 and a 50 mm f1.8 lens attached with an SB900 speed light mounted on camera and bounced off the ceiling.  I thought about going through the trouble of getting studio strobes out and figuring out where to place them but this gave reasonable results and was much simpler.

2014 Crystal Ornament

While setting up for the shot and waiting for everyone to get ready (the picture was taken just before heading off to 7:30 PM mass at St Christopher's), I decided to try and photograph other Christmas related items nearby.  I first moved Amy's large poinsettia plant into the family room and set it up in front of the tree so that I could get a picture of the plant with defocused Christmas lights in the background. The result was pretty nice.
I then moved to the tree and looked around for some interesting ornaments to take pictures of.

2013 Crystal Ornament

Katie's boyfriend, JC, had presented a gift from his mother for the second year in a row.  These are very lovely snowflake crystal ornaments by Swarovski in an ongoing series.  Here are pictures of the 2013 version and this year's 2014 version.  One thing I learned here is that if you plan to take shots of glass or crystal up close make sure you polish off any fingerprints first!  Oh well, live and learn and learning is why I'm doing this blog in the first place.

Pooh and friends enjoy the snow.

Pooh and Piglet off on a grand adventure.

With the Swarovski's photographed, I then turned my attention to a couple of Winnie the Pooh ornaments that belong to Katie (she has a special relationship with Pooh).  I decided to try some experiments with an item I received for Christmas last year.  I used my CamRanger setup for automatic focus stacking shots (I mentioned focus stacking in an earlier blog).  This device connects to the camera via USB and has a small computer in it and a wifi connection for an iPad or iPhone (I suppose Android would work too).  This allows one to take control of the camera remotely and the device has several built in capabilities, one of which is focus stacking.  It doesn't actually process the pictures into a single image, you still need to do that in Photoshop. What it does do for you, however, is make minute adjustments to the focus on the camera between successive shots.  You can configure whether it makes small, medium or large changes (don't know quite what they each are, yet) and how many shots to take before stopping.  With my 105 mm macro lens attached I took a few series of a these two ornaments.  I particularly like the sledding shot because the location of a blue Christmas light off to the right gives the scene an almost moonlit look.
Well that's enough for this week.  I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas with family and friends and I'll be back in the new year with whatever I can come up with for photo ideas.