Christmas lights lite the scene … the story behind the shot.

This shot was fun to make.  Sophia was playing with the lights and they provided the primary lighting for this scene.

Actually the setup for this was a bit more complex, but easy enough for anyone to do.  The final shot was made at 1/6o second, f/4.0 and ISO1600.  I used my 18-135mm lens, set wide open at 18mm.

The room was darkened and the lights placed in front of Sophia … be sure to be on a floor that is dark, but reflective.  You also need to be careful on the amount of lights.  There needs to be enough of them to light her up, but not so much that it overwhelms the photo.

The light from the Christmas lights lit the torso, but only a bit of the head, and not evenly..  Since the lights were on the floor, the head was not lit sufficiently, and there were dark shadows in the eyes.  We solved this by pointing a flashlight in from the left side, slightly above head level, aimed at her face.  Looking back, I should have also had another light, coming from the bottom to open up the eyes a bit more. 

The camera is set at about 6 inches off the floor, the way we got this done was to sit it on some books, since this was too low for the tripod.

In post production, the white balance was adjusted to make the hat rim white, a vignette was added, and smoothing was applied to make up for the graininess due to the high ISO.