Nebula Photography Blog: Sparkles Rest Bite

Just as we were getting into it I had a little work to do outside of Uni, As Nebula my own photography business I had a little log cabin at the Sparkles Christmas market in Stockton On Tees. We were there to help promote our family portrait packages by doing cheap Christmas themed photos on the spot.

You might think what has this got to do with real studio portraits? Well nothing and everything! It was like a mini version of our studio assignment so i tried to emulate the conditions as best i could and implement all we were doing in the studio in a tiny space.

Using a Nikon D7100 with an 85mm lens(tethered to a laptop running lightroom) i shot subjects against a red backdrop with Christmas lights in it for a bit of sparkle. A soft box with a Nikon flash wireless remote controlled from the pop up flash built in to D7100. Due to space restrictions it had to be set at a Rembrandt angle and height for each and the only alteration i could make would be the depth of field depending on how many subjects were in each shot. It looked a lot better to have the background lights totally out of focus,so for single subjects i opened up the aperture as wide as it would go to create a nice bokeh effect. However if there was 2,3 or even 4 i had to close it up a fair bit in order to make sure all their faces were in focus.

In total there were over 200 sittings in the cabin over the week so ive included some of those images as part of this research as I think it helped a lot in the practical side of the shooting. Having to be fully in control of the subjects regardless of their age or temperament.

Sparkled