I know I said no more pictures of the tree.  That is why I am going to call this a picture of an ornament, and definitely not the Christmas tree.  It is very difficult to ignore our huge tree in the house when I have no ideas coming to me late at night.

The post processing gives this picture its magic.  I used a Matt Kloskowshi Lightroom preset called Matt’s Lomo Effect (Strong Blur).  There have been several days when I tried applying this preset to a picture, but it never looked right until today.

I came prepared to Christmas morning over at my fiancee’s sister’s house for some “major” photography.  I loaded up the trunk of the car with more gear than I thought I would need to capture the moments of the day.  I took my tripod, two light stands, two umbrellas, and most of the flash modifiers from my gear collection.  I had about thirty minutes to get set up before the kids woke up to tear into the gifts.

I wound up using two strobes, each extended as high as they would go on their respective light stand.  Both flashes had a stofen-type light spreader on its head to send the light out in every direction.  I wanted the flashes to act as if they were light bulbs hanging from the ceiling.

I placed the flashes set on their stands in the back corners of the room and positioned their heads so that they were pointed and tilted to the center of the ceiling.  I then worked on determining my camera exposure and flash power settings.  I set the camera to manual mode and locked the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings to where I wanted them.  I walked around the room and took pictures of the back of my hand to see what type of light the strobes were producing.  By doing this chimping, I was able to determine the proper power for my strobes.  Thanks to the Canon 7D body, I was easily able to make the changes to the flash power using the menus in the camera body.

Today’s picture is just one of the many I was able to capture using this setup.  I would have liked to have a bit more shutter speed then I wound up with, but my flashes were already set at 1/2 power.  At 1/2 power, I was able to fire off about a frame every two to three seconds and get the light coverage I needed.  I could have increased the aperture, but I would have given up more depth of field.   The other option was to increase the ISO, but I knew from experience that at ISO 800 and above, the noise generated by the 7D sensor is not easy to remove.  So while all of my shots were not keepers mainly because of motion blur, I was able to get some great shots of the day’s joyous events.

My fiancée and I had dinner at the new Vietnamese restaurant in Leesburg tonight.  The food was decent.  Pho 99 in Herndon, VA is still my favorite though.  However, the convenience of this new restaurant in Leesburg is…..well…..convenient!

This is a picture of a summer roll with one bite taken out of it.  I got as close as I could with the Leica point and shoot.  I was carefull not to get too close and have the food touch the lens.  Surprisingly, this type of booboo is very easy to do if you are paying too close attention to the LCD screen on the back of the camera and not where the front of the lens is.

During post-processing, I tried to crop away as many of the distractions in the background as possible.  I also ran the photograph through Noise Ninja to clean up most of the noise.