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We had our annual Christmas Carols at our local school recently and whilst there I took lots of photos of children and the various activities (playing instruments, singing, playing, etc) they were up to.

Around sunset/twilight I took my camera with the 50/1.4 onboard, my SB900 speedlight and a 24" speedlight softbox out onto the oval and let any of the kids who were interested have a play. I took the photos and the kids posed and others held the softbox and strobe which I remotely wirelessly triggered using the glory of Nikon's CLS.

I shot in manual and underexposed the sky (using a fast shutter speed - 1/200, 1/125, etc) and a wideish aperture for a soft background look and let TTL have it's way.

Lots of very nice photos were to be had - here is one of my daughters which turned out OK

looking good Rodney, a couple of observations:

1) the lighting is quite bright and prominent and hence stands out from the BG alot.
2) Position of the light could be higher up to get more shadow under the nose.
3) Obviously in this case a second light or reflector could have helped give the RHS of teh face some more fill light.

I am interested as to why you chose f4, i would have thought opening up to 2.8 would have given more BG light and possibly a more balanced scene (from a lighting point of view)

All that said, the face is nice and sharp and she looks happy and relaxed - that counts for alot imo.

Thanks Gerry

Just to preface - I shot quite a few of these images (over 50 in under 25mins) and the light was dropping rapidly - it was just one child after another (and sometimes two together). This was very impromtu and the kids themselves were hand holding the softbox so positioning the light/subject was a bit random from shot to shot (basically each child who just had their shot taken generally wanted to hold the softbox for the next child)

biggerry wrote:2) Position of the light could be higher up to get more shadow under the nose.
3) Obviously in this case a second light or reflector could have helped give the RHS of teh face some more fill light.

Yep these are givens - basically the height and direction of the light was essentially dictated by the height/positioning of the previously shot child now holding the softbox
I did consider using a reflector but after having decided to give this a try in the first place I had about 30 seconds to setup before we were shooting and then about 10 seconds with each child before they wanted to try holding the softbox and the next child moved in I gave up

biggerry wrote:1) the lighting is quite bright and prominent and hence stands out from the BG alot.
I am interested as to why you chose f4, i would have thought opening up to 2.8 would have given more BG light and possibly a more balanced scene (from a lighting point of view)

Agreed - at start the shots had much brighter sky/background (we were basically in twilight at the start). The first few were at f/2 and I wasn't getting quite enough depth of field so moved to f/2.8. I was already at 1/250th (sync speed) and the sky was still a bit too bright for my liking so I moved to f/4 to kill it a bit more. But over time the sky got darker and darker quite quickly so I moved the shutter a little - ended up at 1/125 for the children a few after this one and In the end it didn't matter the sky was black anyway so I had faces floating in total black (which was also ok). I probably should have opened the aperture up over time as well but it was a mad rush to the finish This shot of my daughter was probably just over half way through the whole sequence.

biggerry wrote:All that said, the face is nice and sharp and she looks happy and relaxed - that counts for alot imo.

Actually some of the others were a lot better (it's always the way that I have much better shots of other children than my own ).

It was fun though - I might do it again sometime next year but do it earlier (before the sun has set) and setup beforehand with softbox and reflector on lightstands - although there is quite a bit of height variation between kindy kids and year 6's and I like the softbox close