Quick Little Charming Christmas Photo Shoot

Michael Zelbel: Dear photography friend, how are you doing? I'm Michael Zelbel. With me, I've got my long lens. Do you know what I see when I'm looking through my long lens? Christmas is coming, far on the horizon but it's coming. But that's cool. For me, it just means it gives me an opportunity to shoot a nice Christmas photo which I can then send out as a greeting to my online buddies. Let's say on Facebook. This is what I'm going to do today. So I decided to shoot a portrait of my wonderful wife Emily who is in the background and doing makeup, because that's a bit personal. Yeah, to make the portrait a bit strange like well, the two of us just are. I asked her to go get the Christmas tree decoration that's out of the cupboard; and have a look what she can use to lets say make a little costume for herself. Now wear Christmas decoration earrings, necklace, put some silver stripes over the face or whatever. I've got no idea, but whatever it's the outcome, I will shoot a portrait of it. To make it yeah really easy, I will do a very fade safe light setup, which is something which I cannot mess up. Whatever is coming, it will work in that light setup. Basically, I do that to just not make a complete food out of myself on a video like this. But what I'd do it in our eating room. So let's head over to the eating room, and setup the light over there. And I'll show you how I'm going to do that. Yeah, so this is our eating room and this is our eating table and over here, I will shoot the portrait hopefully. Emily, over here and the main light from the right, I will get it now. There is a main light. I will use the simple speedlite. So I've flash here merry Christmas. I flash here merry Christmas. Okay, it goes for a shoot-thru umbrella. We needed it a little bit higher. Let's say like this, and switch it on. There we go; let's have a look from Emily's perspective. The light is coming in, like this from the right, from the upper right, and that means we have to fill in for the shades, from over here from the lower end from the left. Left side, we have a white wall that's already cool. It will reflect enough light to fill into shade. Over here, we have got a dark table, that's not so good. So we will change that. I'd simply put there a piece of fabric. It's nothing special, it's just a piece of cloth, really white fabric that we had in the cupboard. So, now light comes from over here. It comes from that, come from there. That's really cool. Light comes everywhere so the model cannot escape the light. She can do whatever she wants. She will always be in the light no matter how she turns. It makes shooting this photo for me so easy, because I cannot pull some of them wrong; and I will need the speedlite. It's a good Canon's Speedlite with the 580 hp. I'll leave it on E-TTL, so I don't have to care about the amount of light. There is nothing I can do wrong. A trained chimpanzee could shoot this photo, which means it's -- yeah, absolutely good for my skill set. But I don't tell anybody else. What else do we have to do? Let's say we want to make it a bit more Christmassy. I don't know if you can see that, but in the background, there is our artificial but nevertheless beautiful Ficus tree. And like every year around this time, I decorated it with some electric candles that will try to catch some light from the candles on the photo. Then, another thing we can do is -- during her last visit, my grandma brought some of this green tree or whatever that is called. My idea is to use it as the sort of frame. So I'll pace it somewhere over here and shoot through this green. I don't know if you can still some me. I'll shoot for this green, and use it as a frame that might be interesting. Okay the last thing we have to do is setting up the camera on, nothing special over there. I'll go for a focal length of 100 millimeter because this is a nice focal length for portrait. I will go for ISO 400. This is a bit high, but it's good for catching some of the ambient light. For instance, the electric candles, and I'll open the patch to a 5 and go to a 60th of a second, because this is what I can shoot from hand. Yeah, that should be it. I have to connect this to the speedlite. I will use an E-TTL cable and then we are set. I'll get the light trying and I will as the dummy for the model. I'll use this wonderful blue yoga mat. So E-TTL cable, speedlite plugs, camera rolling, everything set. Let's try out the lights. Light is beautiful. Okay, setup is complete. Now we need a model. Emily is ready with her makeup. Wow! Look at that, isn't that great? I think it's so simple, but it's looking terrific. I'm loving it. I'm really looking forward to shoot a portrait of it. So without further ado, let's head back to the eating room and shoot the portrait, come. So you're sitting down over here where this wonderful yoga mat was. Make yourself at home. Emily Zelbel: Thanks. Michael Zelbel: Okay. Okay, okay. There is your sun light that looked to me charming, charming, wonderful, wonderful. Okay, let me check. Light is awesome. You are awesome. Okay, Merry Christmas darling. Emily Zelbel: Merry Christmas darling. Michel Zelbel: Yeah, that's cool. Let me check. That got expression, that's wonderful, that's charming. Okay, say happy birthday baby. Emily Zelbel: Happy birthday. Michel Zelbel: Relax your shoulders little bit. Okay but now we're done. Thank you. Thank you. Wow! What a cool little shooting. I liked it. We're done. Emily can now get rid of terrific makeup, and I'm looking forward to see the photos on my computer. I'll check them and upload them. What you can do is please visit my Facebook page zelbel.com/Facebook. If you link up with me, it's not only that I will sent you the you the greeting card that we just shot. What you can do over there is you can upload your photos if you like and I'm looking over the photos there every now and then, because I'm looking for like minded people, for photographers who do similar stuff like I do in order to probably do a project with them in the future. So if you're interested, go there, upload your photos and please if you see photos of other people over there, which you like, please click the little like flag that tells the Facebook and it tells me that you like this photo, which is good. It gives me an impression of what people like. What might be a cool photo for another people. So visit me all the day if you like, but in any case, I wish you good light and see you soon.