We spent most of the day playing with lighting, as I did test shot after test shot, it was quickly apparent that this was the chief concern. If the lighting wasn't right nothing else really mattered because the pictures wouldn't be good. I have huge windows in my living room and they actually provided too much natural light during the day, I had to wait until evening. I added several softer lamps to get light coming at us from all directions.
Then we had to figure out the best placement of the camera and tripod for the best angle.....I found the best angle was with the camera pointed down on us, just slightly higher than eye level from our sitting position. To accomplish this in the middle of my living room floor I used a pub height dining table chair with a small trunk on it. Putting the tripod (it's just a small one) on top.
We took a nice deep brown blanket and hung it on the wall behind where were going to pose. It made the lighting feel much warmer while making a nice backdrop to our pale skin without being a harsh contrast. It also coordinated with our clothing.
I read up on several articles on taking family portraits and do it yourself bloggers. I would encourage anyone who wanted to try this out for themselves to do so! I never dreamed we'd be so successful.
After 2 hours of shooting we had close to 200 pictures added to my memory card lol. I got right to work putting them on my computer to sift through and find the good ones. Then I did some editing to them and wow! I was super impressed with how well they turned out. It was absolutely worth all the work. My husband and girls were champs being patient as we worked out poses.
Here are a few of my favs:
We may never pay to have pictures done again lol. The great part is all the money we saved, but even better is that these pictures have more meaning, we took them, it was a great family experience.
I feel it is worth noting that while I don't have a point and shoot camera (nothing wrong with them though, there are some really great ones out there!) I don't have a super expensive camera either. I think mine was about $250, it's a fujifilm. I'm not really camera/photo savvy enough to be able to tell you why it's a good camera or not lol. But I think with enough playing around any decent camera could pull off some decent photos. There are some great free photo editors out there as well. These pics were edited with photobucket (http://photobucket.com/) but I also have found picasa from google (http://picasa.google.com/) and I think I like it better (you can pay to use premium tools through picnik as well which is pretty cool).
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