Christmas is one of my favorite times of the year for taking pictures. There’s so many unique opportunities that you just don’t get at other times: lights, decorations, fun outfits, and incidental environmental bits like snow and ice all combine to make for some super fun and highly creative ways to create fun photos that you just don’t see the other 11 or so months out of the year. Case in point: this week’s photo, a simple composition elevated far beyond what it would look like any other time of year and it’s all because of the lighting–what you can see in the background, but other lighting as well that I’ll get to in just a moment.
What you’re looking at is one of the Christmas ornaments I have had for years, probably decades even, hanging by its ribbon against a backdrop of lights from our tree. I shot this with my D750 and 105mm macro lens, and initially the only thing I was considering was the multicolored lights about two meters behind the ornament. I spent a while carefully positioning the little purple bear in such a way that it would be framed, essentially, by an array of reds, greens, and blues but when I started taking pictures something just seemed off. The image felt dull and lifeless, and I couldn’t really put my finger on the problem or nail down what I could do to fix it. Then I realized, of course, that the problem was right in front of me the whole time: it’s all about the lighting. The background was great, but I needed to fix the lighting on the subject. Enter the pavotubes!
The solution was simple: put some light on the front of the subject, and also get a bit of backlighting going for an added bit of pizzaz. (Do people still say pizzaz?) You can see the solution I ended up with in the shot below.
Those three lights completely changed the entire shot, and gave me exactly what I was looking for. The background was alive and vibrant, and now the bear was too. Moreso, its ring of colored beads was one step away from positively glowing. I didn’t have these Pavotubes last Christmas and it’s been, oh what’s the technical term…super awesome to be able to use them to sculpt and shape the light for my shots, particularly shots like this, that I never could before.
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