Bringing a new life into the world brings a new life to the parents. You can feel the change take place. Things that used to matter don’t seem so important and things that you never thought about are suddenly brought to the forefront. It’s day four as I write this and that feeling keeps growing stronger each day.
{ The Image }
This is a two light setup with one reflector. We put Noelle on her changing table which I pulled out slightly from the wall to center it with the white bedroom door. I wanted a bright, but vintage style photo so I placed one LP160 speedlight on the floor aimed at the far side (opposite camera) of the changing table so it would bounce back into the bedroom doorway. This light was overexposed by about two stops completely blowing out the door and creating the pure white background.
There are a few ways to deal with cluttered, boring, or distracting backgrounds. Typically you can blur them out with a wide aperture, darken them to where the subject pops against them, go completely black to get rid of the detail, or blow them out to get rid of the detail. Since I wanted a lighter look, I chose to blow it out. Seeing any detail in a door with a knob would completely ruin the simplicity of the photo.
The main light was an LP160 speedlight inside a 24″ Lastolite EZBox with a grid. This light was placed directly to the side of Noelle lighting her entire right side. I had my wife hold a white reflector on the left side to bounce a little bit of the light back into the shadow areas.
I still wanted to get a lot of blur with a wide aperture to put the emphasis on her name. This is where speedlights come in very handy as you can dial the power way down. I shot this image at f1.8 with the Canon 85mm 1.8– impossible using most studio lights as they’d be far too bright at this aperture.
The only processing on this image is a conversion to black and white with a very slight bias toward brown tones and an 8×10 crop. The toning was done in Lightroom and sharpening was done in Photoshop.