We've got less than 7 weeks to go before baby is expected to arrive, and we're already having a hard time keeping up with what we have on our plates. We wrapped up our birthing refresher classes last night. Glad we took those. It's amazing what can change or we might have forgotten in the last 6 years. Not to mention, we have a different instructor with a different style of teaching.

A friend of mine asked me if I had posted any shots lately, and I sadly had to say that I was pretty busy and had not had the time to go out on a shoot or post anything. I took some random shots on Fathers Day at my parents house, but nothing struck me as earth shattering, quality-wise. Not my best work that day. I might post a few that I did like, later on.

So this afternoon, I was reading online about a lighting technique using gels to alter the color of the flash to match a preset in the camera, and letting the background sky drift off to a deep dark blue. It's old news for some of you, but I had never used my gels outside of a studio environment before. It was worth a quickie once the sun went down a little to cross light Ian's face. I like how the shot turned out for a first test and will have to explore this technique again soon.

Camera is in my right hand, flash on ettl cord in left hand, up high. CTO (color temperature orange) gel on the flash and set the camera WB to tungsten. It got the color close, but I ended up fine tuning it in Photoshop RAW. The high speed sync of the flash allowed me to sync at 1/4000s @ f/4 iso 100. The sky's color was not altered at all. That's the color the sky looks on the tungsten WB setting.