Each month in the Artisan Notebook ™ editor Sheryl Cody shares her inspiration for those that are participating in a Project 366 or Project 52. In the March 2012 issue this photo in particular caught our attention. We asked Sheryl to share with us how she captured this photo. This is what she writes, “When I took this photo my house was full of teenagers. I had limited space so I set up the game board on my kitchen table. This image took 2 photos and 2 cameras – both Canon 50D to achieve. I used a 28mm-135mm lens for both shots. For the first photo I placed a strand of lit white Christmas lights in the far background, the Scrabble board and the word capture on the tray in the foreground. Since I was in a limited space, I didn’t set up any lights. I didn’t want a flash either or the blurred white lights in the depth of field in the background wouldn’t come out. I set my first camera to the no flash setting and shot in RAW format. Shooting in RAW allows white balance adjustments in editing and with lighting far from ideal and a time crunch, I decided to worry about the white balance in the editing process. I played with f stops and ISO speed a bit and ended up with f/5, ISO 1600 ,and a lens distance of 65mm for the first photo. For the second photo I took the first camera with the first photo visible in the LCD screen and placed in in front of but off to the side slightly of the game board, set the camera to a RAW format and a program setting this time (I knew with the light from the first camera with everything else I didn’t have to worry about the pop up flash automatically going off). Again I played with f stops and ISO speed. The second photo was shot at f/4, ISO 1600, and a lens distance of 44mm. In the RAW editing, I adjusted the white balance but little else.

Thank you for sharing Sheryl. We invite you to join Sheryl in her monthly “It’s Your Shot” project!

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