Las Sendas in Northeast Mesa, AZ is a great place for family portraits, and since Sarah hasn’t had a family picture in a while, and I wanted to try out some new lighting, we decided to do a family portrait session up there.
We arrived close to sunset and started to set up. Since we’d arrived a bit later than we’d hoped, I’d say that the ambient light was around 1/30 of a second at f4 – challenging, particularly if I wanted to maintain the silky smoothness that ISO 100 produces on Canon’s excellent CMOS sensors.
I set up a white shoot-through umbrella camera-left at 8:00, with the sun camera-right at about 2:00. I balanced the flash – a Vivitar 285 – and ended up with it at 1/16 power.
The hardest part was corralling the kids. They just want to play in the grass and the fountain, and I can’t blame them. There aren’t many places in the metro Phoenix area that offer grass, fountains, desert, and cool stone arches. It’s a virtual playground for a photographer and for kids.
