You can take mediocre photos dozens of times and not realize your mistakes until you start to experiment.
So we were taking the last of the things off the Christmas tree tonight and I asked the kids to help me look for anything we may have missed or forgotten in the tree branches. After a few minutes my oldest son announced that there was a bird’s nest in the tree. Sure enough, deep in by the trunk of the tree, was a little mud & straw bird’s nest leftover from the summer before.
Of course I had to photograph it. The 50mm was still on the body and I didn’t see any reason to change that. The trick here was going to be getting light into where the nest was built on the tree. I tried a few different things to get a nicely lit shot of the nest. I bounced the flash off the ceiling, off the wall, off the curtains… pointed it up, pointed it down, held it with my neck behind my shoulder. After 40 or 50 shots I had some nice exposures of the nest. We even played around by putting in some of the old blown-eggshell ornaments that I inherited from the family. If I were doing a documentary the producers would have been proud, but to me it just looked like a nest in a tree with some eggs tossed in it.
Then, just before dinner, I tried putting the speedlight up over and beyond the tree. The light spilled through the branches and cast a feeling of bright glaring morning sunshine. It was harsh, but I liked the concept. I changed the speedlight from TTL metering to manual and bumped it down to 1/4 power to soften the light hitting the subjects.
Within a dozen or so shots I had some that I thought would work fine. If I hadn’t experimented with the flash through the backside of the tree then it would have been an OK shoot. Instead I let loose and ended up with another shot to be proud of. In post-processing I kicked the exposure up just a notch, cropped to 8×10, and added a slight vignette to fade out the sharp edges. Thank you, Christmas tree, for being perfect in so many ways this year.