As I’m writing this post, it’s currently the night of Christmas Eve in the Hurley household. Sitting by the fireplace, without a blazing fire as it’s far too warm here, Ella and Will are having a giggle and counting down the hours until tomorrow morning. Behind Will’s shoulder is a table set up for Santa and his reindeer, loaded with a few special favorites. Under personal request from the man himself (we have connections…), you can see a bottle of Young’s Double Chocolate stout, some puff pastry sausage rolls that Ella has made specially, a couple of freshly baked Hershey’s chocolate kisses cookies, and of course the obligatory carrots for the reindeer. I hope that everybody has a wonderful and very Merry Christmas!!!
Taken at 8:30 in the evening, once again I used my 17-55mm f/2.8 Canon lens. The light is particularly poor at this time of day in our family room, so my aperture was wide open at 2.8, my ISO was extremely high at 3200, and my shutter speed was slowed down to 1/50. Post processing in Lightroom 4, I initially cropped the image and then converted it to black and white. I decreased the temperature and increased the exposure, contrast, sharpening, and smoothed the luminance.
It’s Christmas Eve and we are all slightly giddy around here. Our day consisted of lunch and presents with my husbands side of the family, and then a beautiful candle light Christmas service and children’s pageant (llama and all) at our Church. Then it was home to make the reindeer food, hot cocoa for Santa and then into our Christmas pj’s. But wait… throw a coat on over those jammies because it’s SNOWING!! It’s really Christmas Eve at it’s finest, filled with lots of holiday cheer! So where did the confetti fit in? Somewhere in between getting home from Church and playing in the snow. I didn’t exactly get the perfect shot, but let’s just say that the fun we had trying, was very much worth the mess we made. Even our dog was covered in bright colored confetti from head to toe!
I took the photo with my DSLR with the 35 mm F 2.0 lens attached. There was no natural light, but well lit with fluorescent lighting. My settings were ISO 400, aperture 2.0 and a shutter speed of 1/160. All editing was done in lightroom. I first increased the exposure,the temperature, and the vibrance. I then adjusted the hues in the highlights, the luminance and details under noise reduction, and increased the tint under shadows.