Family Portraits

Tech Stuff
These are a few shots from a family reunion photo shoot this week for Greg at Insight Photography. This was a fun shoot, but because there were some younger kids, we had to shoot at 5:30 in the afternoon, about two hours earlier than I would have liked. As the light was still really bright, and we had some larger group photos to do, I brought in an Alien Bee B1600 studio strobe head with a 48"x36" softbox to use as a huge fill flash. Once I finished the group photos, I did a few individual family photos (the top and bottom photos) with the big softbox, which worked really wonderfully. After I was done with the posed photos, I spent a few minutes in the back yard with the kids and came out with this (middle) nice portrait. For this I didn't use any lighting, but as the yard by this time was in deep shade, I had to use a high ISO (800), and had to to do custom white balance because of the deep blue colour cast in the shade.

Camera: Nikon D700
Lenses: Nikon AF-S 28-70mm f/2.8 (top, bottom), Nikon AF-S 70-200mm f/2.8 (middle)
Lighting: Alien Bee B1600 strobe with Photoflex 48"x36" softbox (top, bottom), available ISO 800 (middle)