The 'Joys' of Amateur Photography

Our little board of photos & names of parishioners is way out of date (I'm not even sure if that Polaroid camera is still around), and Nancy decided we needed to bring it up to date. Since I'm the one usually around with a camera I was tagged to take the photos. Only this time we'd do it better, with proper lighting, nice backgrounds, and so on.

Well, it sounded good. I've been reading up on how to improve my photographic skills, and here was an opportunity to develop some portraiture skills. Turns out, just in equipment, this is rather more difficult than it appears.

The household budget doesn't allow for hundreds of dollars for "soft-box" illumination devices, not to mention the various flashes needed for same, so I decided to go for a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) setup -- no flash, what I see before me and in the viewfinder is the picture I get.

Would that that were so easy. After a better part of the day with invented alternatives, I wound up with two high-brightness worklights strategically oriented for indirect illumination, one window screened to reduce outside light and reflections off eyeglasses, and a heavy reliance on "white balance" (the reverse side of a business card just inside the photo to establish "white" for post-processing correction), plus a NICE fabric background.

Test shots looked good. We're ready to go.

I think.