Jensen Family Photos 2010

I've been busy but I FINALLY got my butt in gear to do a blog post. There will be tons coming but I hope this will tide you over.
The Jensen Family live in Indiana while Steve attends law school at IUPUI in Indianapolis. We had a small window in which we could shoot their session so we basically just hoped the weather would cooperate. I had a location I'd wanted to use for a long time so with the real possibility of rain and an ominous sky, we drove out to the old farmhouse hoping to get at least a few frames. What we got was one of the most incredible sunsets I've ever seen, and correspondingly amazing family photos.
Steve has already constructed a frame out of reclaimed wood to match the location and these images should be a worthy fit for his home-made frame.

{PHOTO IQ - I used this concept for almost the entire shoot so I thought I'd show the difference between shooting with high-speed-sync flash and using natural light. There's a huge difference in the background because of limited dynamic range in the camera's sensor. For the subject to be exposed correctly along with the background, you need to light the subject to bring it more in line with the amount of light in the scene. In the day time, there's no way to get the proper background exposure other than a really small aperture, ie f/16, or a high shutter speed, ie 1/1500 or so. With a small aperture it makes your power requirement on the flash so large that a portable speedlite (flash) simply can't put out enough light. That makes shutter speed the only other option. This is where the new PocketWizard TTL radio transmitters are a must-have. They allow you to synchronize your shutter at much higher than the typical 1/250 sec that is built in to the system.
The natural light image was shot at 1/250 of a second at f/5 and iso 400. With the hss on my Canon 580exII I was able to light Steve and Tracie about the same amount but up the shutter speed to 1/1600 of a second. That gave me 2.5 stops less light from the sky (about 1/6 the amount of light) bringing it into the range the camera could capture. I love it.}

For those of you on smart phones who can't see the slideshow below, click here to be whisked electronically to the facebook album.

See more at www.jonwoodbury.com