Family Portrait with the Bekking's

Sunday night, I had a family portrait session with the Bekking's. Bill is a friend/colleague of mine. At work, his desk is right beside mine. Not sure if this is accurate, but the time we see each other probably is longer than the time he sees his wife since we started to work together back to about 5-6 years ago... :-) Bill has a beautiful family, 3 young daughters and a recent and new addition, Twister, a German Shepherd and Husky mix. 

Although I've started to look into this, my place is not set up for portrait studio. Not mentioning that I don't have any strobes, I don't even have big enough space for a proper portrait lens to be used, such as 85mm 1.4.  Therefore, during the whole session, I was using the Nikon 24-70, a remote speed-light, SB-800, triggered by the pop-up flash on the camera. Since it was at night, I needed all the lights that I could get. ( Note: most of the light sources in my house produce warm ambient light which created a lot of trouble during the post process later.) The speed-light was mounted on a Manfrotto tripod with white diffuse on. I pointed the flash towards the ceiling.

The following are some of the samples. Bill and Veronica Bekking.

Bill, Kristine and Twister. Note: you would think it's hard to get the dog ready for the picture, it was actual harder to get Kristine to pose... 

Veronica and Frances Bekking.

Kristine and Twister.

Frances Bekking.

Veronica Bekking.

Lyliane and Veronica Bekking.

Finally, many people asked me about my post process (with Photoshop). The following is a side by side comparison (some adjustment has already been made to the original one such as cropping, contract, white balance, etc). I hope you will understand why it usually takes me at least 30 minutes to process each picture, especially for portraits... Nevertheless, the lighting, the technical side of each picture(shutter, aperture,exposure,etc), composition and the models have already defined 70% of if it comes out as a good picture or not.

Sorry Bill and Veronica, I use your pictures as an example :-)

For more pictures, visit my flickr site at http://www.flickr.com/photos/haofeng/

Thanks for reading. The end.