Jablonski Family Portrait

Had a session right before Thanksgiving and I'm finally getting around to writing about it.

We were scheduled to shoot on Sunday, but due to rain, rescheduled to Monday afternoon. Unfortunately it was still overcast, but at least there was no rain.

We met at Piedmont Park, which I'm familiar with as I've already done a shoot here before. I also used this opportunity to push myself and try some different spots and different techniques. Because the sky was grey, I wanted to switch things up a bit and try shooting with the White Balance set to Tungsten so that the sky would go blue. For some reason, I just couldn't get the proper settings on the flash or the correct CTO gel and went ahead without it. I attempted this technique a bit later with the desired result.

The image above was shot with the White Balance set to Flash. Clouds are grey and the shot is kind of uninteresting.

This image was adjusted in Photoshop to demonstrate the look I was going for. Sometimes if the shot isn't working you move forward and revisit later. You can't get hung up on why something isn't turning out the way you want.

I moved on and started shooting different combinations. This is a shot of Chance & Mattea. Much like all brothers and sisters at this age, they didn't want to sit together for too long. However, this is one of my favorites from the session.

This one was one of the last ones taken and we had lost a lot of the ambient light. Which started causing problems achieving proper focus.

I also like this one of Mom & Dad. As you can see, I switched to the Tungsten White Balance and got the grey to turn blue by using a CTO gel to bring the skin tone back from blue.

Of course I needed to get a couple of the baby. I switched to the 50 mm f/1.8 lens to get the shallow depth of field on the playground.

I also like this one. While on the playground, Chance climbed up on a rock wall structure, giving me a unique angle and the sky as a nice background. Once again shooting in Tungsten mode and a CTO gel on the flash.

I had a great time with the Jablonski Family. Chance asked me to play with him on the playground and Mattea asked me to join the family for dinner and have some hot chocolate. It's days like these that I love being a photographer and meeting great people.

If you're looking for a portrait photographer in the Atlanta area, visit my portfolio.