My First Christmas

This Christmas is really special to us because it’s our daughter’s first Christmas.  She is sitting up well and is almost ready to crawl.  Her favorite thing to play with is an old magazine that she can rip up and crumple, so I think it’s going to be really fun with all of the wrapping paper.  Halie and I have been having discussions here and there about how to raise her to make sure that she understands that Jesus is really what everything is about and not Santa Claus.  We’re still not sure how we want to handle Santa, but our goal is for her to know the real reason we celebrate Christmas.  This is a picture we took of her this weekend in front of our Christmas tree.  I love the outfit Halie picked out for her.  What a great Christmas this will be for our families.  She is the perfect gift for us!

For the photographers out there, I thought I’d share how this picture was taken.  It’s a pretty simple setup, but a few things to keep in mind.  Generally when you take pictures in Auto mode you camera will meter off the dark tree and fire off the flash.  This makes the tree look bright, but it looks like the lights are off.  Instead you need to switch to manual mode so you can control the exposure.  Meter off the tree and take a few test shots until you get the tree exposed like you want.  Once you do that, the subject will be underexposed.  In order to bring the subject back up you’ve got to use some other light.  In this case I’ve used a speedlight in a softbox gelled with 1/2 cut of CTO to match the color temperature of the Christmas lights.  The flash was powered at 1/32 + 2/3 stop.  The camera settings were 1/50th at f/1.8 and ISO 320.  I used Daylight white balance to warm it up a bit.  Once you get your lighting right, it’s just a matter of waiting for the perfect expression!