Paul Wilkinson Photography Blog

Thank you to everyone who sent us lovely comments about this year’s Christmas card!

And for the numerous people who asked how we did it (or simply thought it’s all done in Photoshop) here’s how…

1. Make a ’stencil’ out of wire in the shape you’d like the light-trail to be – in this case a Christmas tree and hang it securely from the ceiling
2. Take two small children (our very own Harriet & Jake in this instance as it makes for a much easier model-release form!) and bribe them with something sweet. Chocolate seems to do the trick
3. Once children are in your control – or, at the very least, not arguing with you, set up a black backdrop (we use high-quality velvet. Costs a small fortune but its ability to absorb light is legendary) and place them in front of it with some kind of light source. For this particular shot, we used my Cateye LED lamp from my mountainbike – hence it looks like five little light-trails in the shot as the particular lamp has five large ultra-bright LEDs which also give the image that slightly blue tone
4. Set up a studio flash rig that will light your models. We used a single 1m square softbox just to the left, a flash head pointing straight at the studio ceiling (you can see it in the shots below) and a 3rd head pointing down through a honeycomb. These will need to be on a separate trigger to the camera
5. Blow the dust of your tripod, attach your camera to it and set up a remote release cable. I should point out that I hate tripods. They’re an anathema as far as I’m concerned. An evil beast that does little but suck the life out of people photography. That is, except when you need the camera to be ultra steady for more than a 20th of a second. Which we do. 12 seconds to be precise which is most definitely beyond what I can steadily hand-hold!
6. Once all of this is set, turn off all the studio lights (and the modelling lights on the flash heads) as you want to torch trail to be the brightest thing visible
7. Open the shutter on the camera using the remote release
8. Have each of the children trace the wire stencil with the lit torch pointing at the camera
9. When they’re mid-way through the stencil (or in some position you think suitable) fire the flash heads but keep the camera shutter open
10. When they reach the end of the stencil (or, in Harriet’s case, have finished ad-libbing a star on top. No-one likes a showoff!) close the shutter
11. Pay children whatever bribe you agreed
12. Then, yes I admit it, you do need just little bit of photoshop magic to remove the wire stencil from the images and to composite the two shots together into one for the front of the card

For the technically minded out there, here are the details:
Camera: Nikon D3
ISO: 200
Shutter speed: B (held open for 12 seconds)
Aperture: f13
White Balance: Flash – roughly 5500 Kelvin
Flash heads: 3 Elinchrom monoblocks – 1 point up at the ceiling, one point down through a honeycomb (you can see these in the images below) and 1 large softbox to the left of camera
Bribes: primarily Cadbury Dairy Milk


And, in case you were wondering, this was inspired by the Talk Talk ads that peppered this year’s X-Factor on ITV. You just never can tell where that next idea will come from!

Cheers P.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 26th, 2009, 7:56 pm and is filed under Chat, For Website. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.