Getting It Right In Camera (Indoors Edition)

Sorry, folks. Let me warn you now: This is a photography post. As in... I'm going to be rambling about photography and most of you will not understand what the heck I'm talking about...

But the photog regulars will. Rach, Jamie, Vic, Brig. You'll all get it. The rest of you will probably just enjoy seeing the boys. Well, Henry mostly.

Shooting indoors is not super fun. I stupidly painted my walls yellow which is murder on my white balance and all the orange-yellow oak just adds to the color disaster. Not to mention how ugly those cabinets and floors are anyway. And my couch is a horrible too-dark brown with green tint -- another murderous choice in furniture when you begin to notice how all these things affect your images with your photographer brain.  And unless you have a house made of windows, odds are, there is just never enough light. I'm still trying to nail indoor exposure. It's much easier to do on my full frame which gives me so much more ISO capabilities but I'm notoriously underexposing indoors which just adds to the noise. (See, I wasn't lying about all the photog mumbo-jumbo!) Jamie, Brig, Rach - y'all still hanging in there?

We won't even talk about my inability to keep it consistently picked up enough for non-distracting lifestyle images. Having Henry doesn't help.

I'm trying really hard to embrace my home and the images I am taking in it. And what I can change, I am. Yes... I'm redecorating with photography in mind. The guest room now has all white linens! ;) I'm not the first photog to do it. So, no, I'm not crazy.

All images are SOOC (Straight Out Of Camera - no editing whatsoever)

For images on my couch, we have facing windows to the left and the right - but not directly in front of the couch. The first two images have light coming from the left and the large image, I turned him towards my kitchen where the bigger windows are. On the large one, I wish I'd gotten higher and aimed the camera lower. A crop will help this but I'd prefer more of the mess to be in the background than the wall/lamp/ceiling.

Some more shots from the couch using the light from the left and the right...

And some more... with a cookie...

Moving into the kitchen, I have a large bay of windows and a small window above the sink. These first shots are of the boys eating cookies at the table facing the windows. Charlie is side-lit.

I really love this one shot at the kitchen table too when Henry was drawing his letter O. The large white paper was a bit challenging for exposure of his face but I think it's just about right.

And then here I am backlighting using the kitchen bay windows and the sink window. The first image of H with his cereal is too cool for my taste and he has a blue color cast from his jammies so I would like to fix this in PP. The second image is great from WB and exposure, IMO -- but I'm not loving all the distractions in the shot. Also, YES, he is constantly pushing chairs up to the counter to get stuff. It makes me insane.

And then there's the basement. There is literally NO light down there aside for the small window in the back door so I hardly ever bother to bring my camera. Not to mention the giant mess that's ALWAYS on the floor. However, the other day, Henry was making coffee for me, and we happened to be sitting right in the light from the window, so I shot these -- which was terribly difficult because we had a huge mess to the left and the slide to the right.

Anyway, there's a look at some of the indoor natural light photography I worked on during the month of February (too cold to play outside!!!). Also, a look at some of the quieter moments of our life! I'm slowly starting to love shooting indoors!!