This year, we wanted to take family photos that we could use for a printed Christmas card, but did not want a formal, “studio” look. My wife and I took some photos of each other and our daughter, while we were painting wooden Christmas tree decorations in our living room. The photos were not strictly “candid”, since we were aware of the camera, but we used only ambient light to imitate the candid, spontaneous photo style.
The lighting was quite dim, so the photos turned out quite noisy. This is Ok, however, since the prints are going to be very small, so they can handle quite a bit of noise reduction in post-processing. We used a Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L USM
For a group portrait of all three of us, I set the camera on a tripod and used a 10 sec timer. After a few tries we got a decent shot, but shooting with the wide aperture gave a narrow depth of field, and our daughter ended up being slightly out of focus. Hopefully, this will look Ok in a small image on the card.
A really precious and unexpected moment for us happened when our daughter walked over to the camera that was sitting on the tripod and started taking photos of us. Below is her very first photograph. As a parent, I am biased, naturally, but I like it!
