Dan Perovich's Cyberfront Property

Photo365-20091218 – Ginger-yum House, originally uploaded by HokiePerogi.
25.0 sec @ f/14, ISO 400, 50 mm (EF50mm f/1.8 II)

Today my fiancee and her nephew made a ginger break house together.  Upon coming home and seeing it on the dining room table, I knew it was going to be my subject for today.  It was practically in the perfect place too, right in front of the tree.  In order to get the star bursting effect on the tree lights, I knew I would need a small aperture and a long shutter speed.

I set the camera up on the tripod and placed an Apollo softbox at camera right.  I then set up the white disc reflector on camera left to open up the shadows on the left side of the house.  I took a few shots to determine the best flash power settings to light the ginger bread house.  I quickly determined that I needed to modify the light from the flash with a CTO (color temperature orange) gel to more closely match the ambient light from the tree.  After getting the ginger bread house lit to the way I wanted it to look, I started to slow down my shutter speed little by little until the exposure of the tree was spot on.

In hind sight, I should have corrected the white balance during post processing.  It seems that there is an abundance of yellow in the final picture.  My guess is that the 7D auto white balance chose a flash setting instead of a tungsten setting.  I should have manually set the white balance to match the color of my gelled flash to avoiding having to make an adjustment during post.