Today, nine years ago, I became a father. And it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. So whenever there is a birthday we try to come up with something cool to make the birthday party invitation cards. Here is Kobe’s ninth birthday party invitation:

There was this great haze and beautiful muted colors in the ambient light when Kobe got home from school. From experience I know this kind of light, when underexposed turns into this nice moody shades of blue if you play around with the white balance a bit and use it in combination with an orange gelled soft main light

The first idea was to just make a simple but cool portrait. As I found out last year with his communion photos, Kobe really know how to strike a pose.

In the next picture you can see the setup. Because the ground is muddy and uneven, I took Maya with us to hold the light stand, just in case. As the ambient light levels were really low, I could have done it with just a speedlight but took my Elinchrom Quadra instead. I haven’t used it that much for quick location shoots. It’s very small and light for a rather powerful studio light, but it’s still bulky and unhandy when you are working as a one-man-band and already have a heavy kit of DSLRs and lenses with you. For commercial shoots where there’s time, assistants and dedicated parking spaces that’s not a problem but if I’m out on my own I often find it too much hassle.

But with just the GX1 and the 20mm there’s suddenly a lot of carrying power that becomes available. In combination with the Quadra, an umbrella and a sturdy stand, it’s still a very comfortable kit to lug around. And I got the added benefit of having a more powerful and faster recycling light than a speedlight. But the most important reason why I choose the Quadra is LIGHT QUALITY. The design of a studio light just makes for softer, more even light without the hotspot you get with speedlights. I think I’m going to experiment a bit more with this setup for quick location portraits in the near future.

The portraits turned out quite nice but I felt we could do something more fun. I got the idea to make a picture with nine Kobes in it. By that time the ambient light was starting to disappear so I quickly grabbed my tripod from the car and we started racing the sunset.

I’m certainly not incredibly original with this idea but it’s fun to do. If you don’t know how to do this kind of composite, here’s how I did it for this picture:

- establish your scene and lock down you camera on a tripod
- shoot at least one picture with just the ambient light
- shoot nine different pictures without moving the camera
- don’t worry about the light being in the frame, just make sure you got at least one picture with just the ambient light
- try to previsualize the positions of your subject in the final picture. In this case it could have made a much nicer composition of the nine Kobes but I just didn’t have the time. So this was down and dirty.
- process all RAWs with identical settings open them in one Photoshop file as layers. (In Lightroom that’s selecting the images – right click – edit in – open as layers in Photoshop)
- make sure your ambient light exposure is on the bottom
- make sure all your layers are perfectly aligned. Despite using a sturdy tripod but without a cable release, some of the layers were a couple of pixels off.
- I then added layer masks to each layer to paint in just the subject. If your background exposure is the same in all pictures, you can easily get away with a rough lasso selection. But in this case the ambient light was dropping fast, causing slightly different background exposures for each file. So I had to do some painting in the layer masks to get it right.
- Something I’ve learned from some of the best retouchers is that you often don’t need to spent hours of painstakingly creating perfect cutouts with the pen tool. If all depends on how the picture is going to be used. This picture ended up on a 10x15cm card so nobody is going to see that the selections are a bit rough here and there by quickly doing it with the paint brush in a layer mask.

And there it is after 12 minutes of shooting and about an hour of post processing:

Happy birthday big boy! You’ve already given me so much joy, love, wisdom and a reason to exist.