Dad And Son Portraits And How We Did It

This afternoon it was just myself and my youngest son, and I had promised him that I would talk him through lighting and cameras and do a little photoshoot with him. Although not a “studio”, I use the boys bedroom when its free and follow a simple set-up to get the results that you have seen and you’ll see below.

Today I used the Nikon Z6ii, the Nikkor Z24-70mm, a Godox TT685N flash, a Godox X2Ttrigger, a couple of stands and a black backdrop and today I used a little white umbrella for the flash (at other times I use other diffuser types).

Once set up, I adjust the height of the umbrella, so that it is pointed at the top half of the body. Without the flash attached, I adjust my settings so that when I take a photo there is complete darkness. This means that only the light from the flash will be captured on camera and I have full control of the light.

Don’t forget, camera shutter-speed has no effect on the image when using the flash, so it was around 1/2000 or so. The aperture controls how far the light will travel. I find that F/4-F/6.7 is best for these kind of images in this environment, but it is always nice to experiment. My ISO is set to 100 at all times in this kind of environment (although, outside it would be used a lot more to control the brightness of the light).

The images of my son George are taken by myself, and the images of myself were taken by George. George had full control of the composition and controlling what I was doing by asking me to do different things.

Images were just straightened and cropped to 5:4 and basic colour correction was added in Darktable. I just resized in Photoscape and cloned out the little pegs holding the black background and any little light that leaked through for any reason.

I hope you enjoyed this little description of events, and like the images that we ended up getting! I think George is going to be a fine photographer when he is older.