Anniversary

Today marks five years since Holly and I got married. Five whole years. I’m thirty now, at my age I find five years to be the sort of length of time that feels neither ages ago nor just the other day. Five years is still a long old while, though, and since it seems like a nice round number I decided to mark the occasion by taking some portraits of us together. We’ve not often taken pictures of us together, usually it’s me thing photos of Holly when she’s not looking or, on rare occasions, actually cooperating in having her picture taken with with me behind the camera.

For this shoot I set up my camera with my 50mm f/1.4 on a tripod in our living room, hung a black sheet from the bookcase, and placed my Speedlite 430EX II with a soft box to camera right on another tripod. I then rigged up my phone to the camera with my Triggertrap so I could remotely trigger the camera with my smartwatch. I then killed the lights, and switched the camera to manual so it didn’t try exposing for the darkness.

With that I was ready for a few test shots of Holly.

With Triggertrap’s smartwatch app I could then remotely fire the shutter whilst being in the shot myself (I know there are various wireless triggers on the market, but this is what I have). The only challenge would be staying in focus (as the Triggertrap requires the camera to be in manual focus mode – and the low light I was shooting in would have made the autofocus struggle anyway).

So then we did some shots, playing about whilst I fired off shots as quickly as the flash recharge would allow.

Not all serious, of course.

We took pause for me to review the shots and see how many actually came out in focus (admittedly quite a few were rejected). I then decided to switch to my 24-105mm to give me a wider angle and a less shallow depth of field, and set up a second flash to camera left bouncing off a reflector at a low power just to fill in the left side of our faces a little more.