I know, I know respect the bird! Usually I don't even consider Christmas until Thanksgiving is over, but there are so few days in between Christmas and Thanksgiving this year, and with not feeling great, I have to get things in when I can.
Therefore, I took Henry's Christmas pictures a little early this year. They were so easy and so cute, that I had to share!
First, the setup. It was a simple white sheet, some Christmas lights and ornaments. The lights are taped to my fireplace and the ornaments are hung with pipe cleaners. So, all stuff I had sitting around! I used my Cannon T2i and a 50mm lens for this shoot.
The room has a large picture window in it to let plenty of natural light in. However, the natural light washed out the Christmas lights, so I had to shut one of my (very light colored curtains) to help get this effect.
To get the nice blurry background I had to play around with a couple things. One was my f-stop. I turned it to a f2.0. My lens could go lower, but I found that I couldn't get a clear enough picture of a wiggly toddler with it any lower.
Second, I had to move my subject away from the background. I tried with a stool first. If the stool was too close to the background, the background wouldn't blur. Move the stool a couple of feet, and the whole effect changed.
Getting Henry to cooperate was by far the hardest part. That required left-over Halloween candy, and bribes for Henry's ultimate treat -- a glass of juice. I took probably close to 200 pictures, and I'm glad I did, I think we got some really cute ones!
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