Family Christmas Card shoot

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This year my wife found some example pictures on Pinterest that she liked involving a baby surrounded by a strand of Christmas lights and she wanted pictures of our kid like that. My first couple of test shots were fairly successful but the biggest problem was there was nothing behind the kid other than a blank wall. We decided to go ahead and decorate the Christmas tree to give the picture some depth. In all the shots, the tree is setup about 10 feet behind our subject which was a good distance for light bokeh. I'm about twelve feet in front of my son and the lights laying on a blanket. I am using my 85mm prime with the aperture at 1.8f. The ISO is 350 and the shutter speed varied between 1/50 to 1/80 of second. I didn't use a tripod because my vantage point was lower than my tripod could go and it was helpful to be able to auto-focus on the fly. Thankfully the light from the strand was bright enough for my camera to focus. We picked out 6 photos as our finalists for our family Christmas card and these 5 in this post are the runners up. I'll be posting the final image closer to Christmas.

Shadows and Lights

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While walking my dog one dark, foggy, early morning at my in-law's neighborhood, we walked past some trees that blocked the light of a street lamp. The fog really made the light rays stand out among the shadows. This photo moment snapped me out of my morning haze and I rushed back to the house to get my camera and tripod.

These pictures make me feel like Gandolf the White is about to rejoin the fellowship. "I come back to you now at the turn of the tide. . ."

This first picture is shot with a 35mm focal length, 6 sec Exposure time, aperture f1.8 and an ISO of 200.

This next picture is an HDR photography I made with 3 images I shot with the bracketing feature of my camera at 2 stops below and under the correctly metered photo. It combines exposures of 3 sec, 0.77 sec, and 13 sec. Compared to the picture above, the fog is less hazy and you see more detail of the leaves on the ground.

The next two are of another HDR photo I took but the difference is these have more of the long shadows of the trees cast on the ground. Exposure times are the same as above. The black and white version is my favorite.