We start on Christmas Eve with a walk down into Lower Morden to look at the lights adorning all the houses down there - the road in question makes a huge community effort, and collects loads of money for charity through their efforts each year.

Christmas day, we opened some presents at home in the morning, then in the afternoon, went across to my sisters for Christmas dinner, and more presents.

Boxing day, we had Jan & Russell over in the morning for yet more presents, then everyone else over to our place, for yet another Christmas dinner in the afternoon, finishing the day with a huge family “Guitar hero - World Tour” session!

Finally, we have some shots from the next morning, when we went out with Francesca on her new bike for the first time. Click below on the photo to get to all the images….

For those interested, the lighting for all the indoor shots you see here was done with 2 or 3 (depending on location) SB800/600s on lighting stands, pointed straight up at the ceilings in the corners of the rooms, with a wide zoom setting (24mm). The ceiling bounce from multiple directions gave good lighting from any location in the room, with enough shadow from pretty much any angle to ensure things were still interesting. For example, in the following shot, two flashes were set up, one behind the subjects to the left of camera, and one behind the camera (also to the left). The wall to the right acted as a huge white reflector, providing a nice level of fill from the other two lights. The rear one also acted as a rim-light, with the main, soft light coming from the light behind the camera (which you can see in the reflection in the glass doors - sloppy framing on my part!)

If you want to read more, I used this Strobist article as a basis for my setups.

I went up early to take some pictures, and Louise would have joined later, except someone decided to throw themselves in front of a train on the District Line, so Louise was stranded for a couple of hours in the rain, and I had no trains running to get back to her… When public transport fails, it really scr*ws you!

The lights were switched very low, end eventually off, for most of the evening, so it wasn’t the most ideal shooting environment (I wanted to run without any flash to preserve the mood), but a fast (f/1.4) lens combined with the low light abilities of the D3 has provided some shots that I’m fairly pleased with.

Click on the image below to get to the photos:

Zanell from South Africa

Originally uploaded by David Woof

For this shot, I wanted to go for a grungy, slightly aggresive look, and Zanell was a great model for helping with that. The lighting was a pair of SB-800s triggered from an SU-800, all in manual modes, the one to camera right through a soft box, the one to left providing a touch of fill through a white umbrella. An SB-26 gelled purple (running in SU-4 slave mode) provided the colour under the arch behind Zanell.

This was taken at the inaugural Southern Strobist Group meeting at Netley Abbey near Southampton in Hampshire.