Recently we did the Photos for a young lady’s 18th Birthday party.
The event was outdoors and indoors with a great Marquis area setup for sit down eating, complete with Popcorn and FairyFloss Maker.
This made for some great color and photos.
A full Flickr Gallery of Photos can be viewed at this link:
Flickr Photo Gallery of Mel’s 18th Birthday
The full photo gallery can also be found on the Photos By Passy Facebook Page:
EQUIPMENT:
Sony Alpha A-77
Tamron 24-70mm F2.8
On Board Sony Flash (for fill flash)
Most shots were taken with the camera set to an automatic “Portrait Mode” using the SCN setting on the Sony A-77.
Due to the bright sunlight, we knew that we would need to do Fill Flash to blast away sharp shadows on People’s faces.
We were set up to go with the Yongnuo Flash and a Gary Fong Lightsphere Diffuser; however Yongnuo incompatibility problems arose and the flash refused to communicate with the camera, and would not flash in any shooting mode, even with forced fill flash turned on.
This meant we were forced to use the Sony A-77’s inbuilt flash, with no diffuser, but surprisingly it did a reasonable job.
Many shots were a bit overexposed, but this was easily fixed during post-processing in Photoshop.
There was a problem with people squinting in sunlight, but we did our best to reposition subjects in their poses to avoid this.
Taking photos inside a Jumping Castle was also a difficult job fraught with danger!
We were very happy with the performance of the Tamron 24-70mm lens, coupled with Portrait mode on the A-77. This combination produced some very nice soft but reasonably sharp portrait shots.
For the party someone had made a nice portable painted cardboard picture frame, that people could hold around them while photos were taken.
When we saw this Photo Frame, we thought it would be a good idea to have a dark uniform background to do the frame pictures in, but it turned out that this was a bad idea.
We wasted a fair amount of time and effort trying to setup a good photobooth area to do handheld frame shots in. It turned out that it was better to just wander around the event, and grap people weherever they were and get them to hold the frame around them and snap the shot.
Something else we need to watch out for at parties, are bright yellow power extrension leads draped all ove3r the place. They are very bright, stand out strongly in photos, and are very hard to photoshop out during post processing.
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Enjoy,
Passy