Portrait Sessions – the Velcani Family

I did a family portrait session with the Velcani’s from Ottawa last month.  The weather was, well, very Canadian, with grey skies, cold temperatures, and occasionally spats of very cold rain.  They had driven a couple of hours each way for the session, though, so we were determined to plow ahead and make it work.  I packed along some blankets along with my usual props, and in between takes everyone huddled in the blankets to try to keep warm.

Despite the less than desirable weather the kids were fantastic!  Full of smiles and energy, and I was able to capture some of their joyful interactions.  It’s great when kids cooperate despite the circumstance, and, as a result, we got a number of photos that I really liked despite the logistical challenges.

We shot in two distinct environments – one is more of field setting where I could capture the tall, late autumn dried grasses with some depth behind the family.  The second was in a pine forest.  I chose a long tunnel between the trees for most shots to give some depth (and delineation of the subject (family) from the background and enable some dimensionality.

Here’s some of the photos:

The gear oriented among you can check out what I used in the workflow below.

Gear Used:

Canon EOS 6D DSLR Camera (Body Only)
Canon EF 35mm f/2 IS USM Lens
Tamron SP 70-200mm f/2.8 Di VC USD Zoom Lens for Canon
Metz 64 AF-1 Flash units
Lite Scoop Lite Genius II
Adobe Lightroom CC Software for Mac and Windows (Boxed Version)
Adobe Photoshop Creative Cloud 1-Year Subscription
Alien Skin Exposure X (Use Code “dustinabbott” to get 10% anything and everything)

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