Last night we hosted our annual family Christmas party. I was surprisingly able to convince everybody to do a family portrait, which doesn’t happen too often in this clan. I quickly pulled out 2 umbrellas and set them up as shoot-through with my SB-600’s at full power. I dialed in a shutter speed of 1/125th and an aperture of f/7.1 which would get everyone relatively sharp. I used my ML-L3 wireless remote to trigger it, which in this shot you can see me doing so (I wasn’t making much of an effort to hide it).

Of course, once we got a good shot I had to get everyone to do the traditional “goofy face” shot.

Which was then followed by “OK, everyone in the back jump on the people up front” which resulted in this shot:

The only real editing that had to be done was cropping to 8×10 and the removal of a power cord that was plugged into the floor outlet to the left of the couch. I used Photoshop CS5’s new Spot Healing tool with Content Aware to remove the cable and then used the Clone Stamp tool to clean up the lines in the wood flooring. I actually left the plug itself in the socket just because I could. It’s amazing how efficient Content Aware is, but it still needs to be finessed a bit to look right in busy photos such as these.

Just so you can see where the annoying cable was, here’s a zoomed in crop of it:

If I was really on my game, I would have spotted that while I was setting up the shot and not have had to rely on Photoshop, but I’ll blame Mr. Heineken for clouding my judgment as I wrangled everyone together – It was a party after all 😉