Family Portraits in the Fall

Portrait Photography in the aspen stand

Our daughter, Eimear (rhymes with femur), was stuck in the Seattle airport at around midnight last summer. A 14-year-old kid alone in a big international airport. A family saw her crying alone at the ticket counter and asked where she was from. Turns out this family was also caught in the airport and are from Bend. They offered to give her a ride home. What luck for them to all have run into each other in the same placed at the same time. The airline, bless their hearts, were going to fly Eimear back to San Jose and let her spend the night in the airport.

So this family, the Bledsoe’s (not related to the football family here in Bend), rented a car and gave Eimear a ride home. They’re both child psychologists. Eimear entertained them with songs she learned in the Santa Cruz camp she was on the way home from.

As repayment I said, “Let’s do portraits.” We were trying to get the right time for portraits in the fall at the aspen stand next to the dirt road on the way to Tumalo Falls and ended up with the tail end of the leaves. I’ll do another blog post with more of the pictures, but am out of the house right now and doing this post through my phone.

This picture stood out even when it presented itself. It was one of those pictures where I didn’t even need to take a picture to know it would be the best picture of the day and perhaps even of the month. Just above Evie were a pile of twiggy branches coming off the aspens. Below her were a bunch of twiggy branches half covered with bright leaves. But just in between, able to be isolated with a 70-200mm zoom lens were the white aspens. It was a Baby Bear picture: too much of one thing and it wouldn’t work. Too much of another thing and nope, won’t work. But just this right amount and yes, it works. She put her arms around the tree on her own. I didn’t have to ask her. The look on her face was natural and not posed. Being a natural born slacker, you know I absolutely love when a picture happens with minimal work.

The light was the key.

Off to camera right and a little above I had my trusty Profoto with the new 3 foot pop-up octabox. It’s my new light shaping tool of choice. The octabox squishes down to a manageable size when traveling, it pops open in about 5 seconds when deploying, it clamps onto the light in another five seconds when shooting. The big modifier makes beautiful soft creamy light when used about three feet away from the subject. Being able to do this in an aspen stand amazes me to no end. Profoto makes a bigger four foot octabox and I was tempted, because bigger is better. (That’s what she said) But windy conditions would make working with a four foot octa almost impossible.

So, blast the light and let the background go a little dark? Or expose for the background and let the kid go a little bright? Choices, always choices with portrait photography. I chose the latter because sometimes the secret to using a light like the Profoto is to make it look like you didn’t really use a light. I can’t explain how to do it. There’s a lot of moving parts with using a light and making it look like no light was used. Someday I’ll need to sit down and figure out exactly how to do it with a light meter and a tether tool to my laptop so the pictures pop up immediately. Until then it’s kind of hit or miss.

Eimear got a ride home in an emergency. The Bledsoe’s got some halfway nice portraits. I got this shot for my portrait photography website. So for me this was a win win scenario. My favorite kind of scenario.