carlo obillos photography

As my kids moved through nursery school, I always felt like I was missing out on something. We had received photo albums for school portraits when each of our sons was born, but it seemed like forever until we would get to start filling them up. I take lots of shots of the kids, but its a rare occasion when I make them sit still for anything so formal as a school photo. And putting t-ball shots in the school album just seemed like a non-sequitur.

Something needed to be done. I approached the director of my sons' nursery school and offerred to shoot some portraits of the kids- we scheduled some visits, wrote a letter home to parents, and started shooting.

My original plan was to put the kids outside, use a long pc cord, long lens, and large aperture to turn the background into mush. It was a good plan, given that Winter had given up more than a month before. But then Winter came back. It came back with 15 cm of snow and harsh, blistering winds two days before I was to start shooting. Outside=no. Go to Plan B.

This particular nursery school resides in a former residence, full of the original woodwork and loads of character. I ended up choosing the wooden front door as a backdrop for a couple of reasons: First, the warm tone of the door was too good to pass up, and second, the white wall just to the right of the door provided perfect fill light, which simplified my lighting setup immensely.

Exposure was set at iso100, f3.2, 1/160. At this exposure, the room lights were doing nothing, but the window light was giving me a bit of glow on the kids' hair. A canon 580EXII flash in an umbrella was the main light (to the left of the camera) and the aforementioned white wall bounced the flash back to the other side of the face, providing fill light. Post-processing on shots like this is almost non-existant, since the lighting and exposure are tightly controlled, and there is no variation from shot to shot.

School photos