For Unto Us A Child Is Born

"For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given...and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace." Isaiah 9:6

I guess no photographer worthy of the title can let the Christmas season pass without the obligatory photo of something in front of the bokehed Christmas tree and lights. I chose our family nativity set for my first attempt.

I was somewhat stumped in trying to get the look I wanted. Due to the width of the tree, the size of the set, the available shooting distance front-to-back, and lack of a really wide aperture lens, I really couldn't get the background out of focus the way envisioned. In order have the tree fill the background of the nativity set I had to arrange items and select a zoom length on my lens that would only let me stop down to 5.6. I'm holding our for 2.8 from Santa this year!

To get the bokeh effect, I used the Lens Blur filter in Photoshop. This is the first time I've tried this and while the purists may turn up their noses, I think it's just fine for this particular shot and certainly a vast improvement over the out-of-camera composition that had the background in much more focus.

Lighting set up was a Canon 430EX II flash in a shoot thru umbrella to camera left to illuminate the nativity. The tree was far enough back that it got very little spill from the key light so I added a second 430EX II in a shoot through to far camera right, dialed down a couple of stops and aimed at the tree for some background fill. Every thing is topped off with a bare LP120 high and behind the subject to camera left to give some rim/backlight illumination.

May the love of Christ richly bless you and your family this Christmas season!