I feel like I’m never in the loop on when it’s supposed to snow! If I don’t have a shoot scheduled during the week, and I’m not training for anything running-wise, I almost never check the weather because I work from home. So when it started snowing yesterday afternoon, I was surprised…and then shocked when I finally saw the forecast that said we were supposed to get 6-8 inches! Of course, that’s not a lot for some people, but for us, that’s a significant snowfall and almost certainly guarantees a snow day.

Sometime last night I decided to grab my camera stuff and take a few images of John and I together in the snow. I rarely take portrait type photos with off camera flash and I hardly ever take photos of the two of us together besides a phone selfie here or there, but the opportunity presented itself and I just went for it. This year one of my goals has been saying “yes” to things that come my way, and I felt this was as good a time as any to put that goal to work!

It was cold, and the snow was CRAZY HEAVY but I’m so excited we did it!!! Here’s what I did to get this image, in case you’re interested in taking one yourself!

CAMERA SETUP
5d Mark III on a tripod with 50 1.2 attached. Camera settings ISO 1600, F/2.8, 1/100. To get this set up, I had John stand approximately where I wanted us to be in the photo, and I focused on him. For “selfies” like this, we use a remote and self timer. If you don’t have a remote, you can just use the self timer in a pinch, but having a remote makes it lots easier to pose yourselves, because you aren’t running back and forth! Just hide the remote! Haha. TIP: Using back button focus is important for selfies like this, because if your camera is set up to focus when you depress your shutter button half way, the camera will focus itself when you hit the remote. It’s better to do it manually and choose your own focus point.

FLASH SETUP
580 ex II on camera (pointed straight up, with white bounce card out to reflect a bit of light onto our faces), 480ex II behind us on a nightstand with an umbrella. 580EX was set to 1/8 + 0.3. the 430 was set to 1/8. You can read about my exact OCF setup more here and here, but in general, I put one flash behind us to illuminate the snow and create a second source of light so the background wasn’t completely black. The flash on camera was used to provide a little bit of fill, so the background wouldn’t be way brighter than our faces.

MY BEST TIP
The best tip for an epic selfie like this?? Take LOTS of photos. Since you can’t see what the image looks like (you can actually get an app for this though, if you have a 6D!!) you will want to take a bunch of photos to have a variety of options. This image was one of 20!

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