Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 — 1/125 sec, f/5.6, ISO 3600 — full exif
Cake Arrives
six candles: confirmed!
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 — 1/125 sec, f/2.8, ISO 1400 — full exif
Basking in the Song
“Happy Birthday to You”, of course
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 — 1/125 sec, f/4, ISO 1250 — full exif
(Maybe I Spoke Too Soon)
must talk to him, again, about safe knife-handling procedures...
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 — 1/125 sec, f/4, ISO 1800 — full exif
used to be his
Name Written in Chocolate
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — 1/125 sec, f/3.2, ISO 1000 — full exif
Washing It All Down
with cold, tasty milk
Looking in my photo archives, I see we've done this type of thing a few times before. We did it last year, and the year before as well. It's almost as if we do this every year. 🙂
I'm not all that happy with the photos... the lighting was horrible (mixed incandescent and fluorescent) which makes for a white-balance nightmare, and for the dark, candle-lit shots.... I dunno.... I just expected more from a D700 that can take pictures in the dark. One of the problems was nailing focus... the lack of a good focus screen on the D700 is maddening.
And when I had the autofocus Nikkor 24-70/2.8 on there during the brighter times, it still had a lot of issues in letting the shutter release after focusing. It focused just dandy, but it didn't think it did, and so held the shutter back. Maddening. I eventually switched to manual focus, but then we go back to the first problem.
Then there are problems that I brought on myself by not paying attention to what was going on. Every single shot of him and the cake shows what looks like only five candles. I just got really really unlucky with the candle alignment WRT my position. Sigh. Because I wanted the first photo on his “turns six years old” post to show six candles, I went ahead and “enhanced” that first photo by adding an extra candle and two extra flames. (All in Lightroom, no less.) Had I not done it, it would have appeared at first glance to have only four candles. As it is now, upon very close inspection, you'll see seven candles.
Then to add insult to injury, there's apparently a bug in the color-management support in Firefox 3 that, when color-management is enabled, causes the darkest parts of the candle-lit photos to be rendered in a horrible pixelated, striped way that I'm at a loss to explain. Firefox on the Mac works fine, as does Firefox on Windows if I turn off color management. Sigh.
Luckily, Anthony doesn't care about these photo woes. He got toys.
Happy birthday Anthony!
I think this is a great sequence, especially the candle-lit ones – I’d be very proud of them. I don’t think this sort of shot requires pin-sharp focus, and certainly none of them worries me at all in that respect. The first one, especially, is a real cracker.
As for Firefox, I have CM enabled and can’t see any pixellation or stripes BUT, having read the text, then gone back to the first photos, I get a long lasting after-image of the text – I expect it’s my age! Be interesting to see if others see what I can’t.
Happy sixth, Anthony!
Happy birthday, Anthony!
Jeffrey, with regards to the AF problems you mentioned. Try setting the camera in release priority (options a1 and a2 on the D200). This way when you trip the shutter the shot will be taken, even if the AF module might think otherwise.
I’ve combined this by using the AF-ON button to focus. The combo works for me.
Many happy returns.
Don’t fret the technical stuff (you take some great family memories). My seventh (a long, long time ago – Star Wars, galactic time) was the “day that Birthday Parties Stopped”.
I think Anthony demonstrates a degree of contentment and restraint that I think my parents only wished I had at his age.
Happy Birthday little man!
-Aunt Marci
I think you’ll come back to these and end up liking them a lot. Your memory of the scene as it looked looked to your eye and how you wanted them to look is still strong – too strong, perhaps, to let you see how good the photos are. Before reading your comments, I was left thinking that this was an excellent set. There’s a relaxed, genuine and unforced atmosphere about the candlelit pictures – the kind of thing we could never have dreamt of before cameras like the D700. All the birthday pictures of my own childhood were lit with those four-shots-per-cube disposable units that my father used with his little Kodak. 🙂 They have their own charm but you can’t beat ambient light.
First of all, happy birthday to Anthony!
The problem with shooting in candlelight (when the light source itself is part of the exposure) is more a dynamic range problem than a low light ISO problem. The range of brightness between the candle flames vs the shadows on Anthony is huge. I’m sure there might be some sort of fancy way to light this strobist-style and arrange the light to get it all to look great and be within range but don’t ask me what it is.
Oh and by the way, I think the photos are great
Happy birthday, Anthony!
The photos look very good to my eye (having tried the same recently with D200 and seeing the results 😉
I have a question though. You said: “I went ahead and “enhanced” that first photo by adding an extra candle and two extra flames. (All in Lightroom, no less.)”. How did you do that purely in LR? I was not aware LR2 allows cloning?
Alex
There’s a dust-spot cloning/healing tool, which can be used for more than just dust spots. It’s only circular, so I needed several for each item, and a bit of luck, but it happened to work out. —Jeffrey
Lovely photos of Anthony’s birthday. In the second photo of the cake cutting set, looks like cake is going to be obliterated!
あんと、おたんじょうび、おめでとう！！