Cissa is 6!! ~ Snow Portraits ~ Westcott Parabolic Umbrella

Well I finished up my last family edit and decided to quickly process these to show off my girl and to write a quick review of a new toy I mean tool that I picked up last week!  I just purchased a Westcott 7 foot parabolic umbrella.  for those of you who don’ know what that means and don’ t care, skip this part and just look at my cute not so little anymore little girl!  😉 For those who don’t know what that means and do care, here we go…  In a nut shell, a parabolic umbrella is usually much larger than your typical umbrella and more importantly will focus the light a bit more than a standard umbrella.  It has more panels and creates a more “Fashion” look.  Now the ones they use for vanity fair cost thousands of dollars just for the umbrella and you literally need a dolly to wheel them around.  So this one is pretty tame and very practical!  It retails for a near $100 and I scooped it from B& H for just $49 on a Cyber Monday deal!  😀  Anyway, I saw the sun come out today after a pretty nice snow storm and decided to head out and photograph my Daughter’s 6 year portraits!   All of these were shot with the Nikon D4 and with the 70-200 vr 2 at about 190-200mm and between F5 and F6.5.  With the exception of 2 images which were shot at f 2.8 and I only used the umbrella as a reflector.  I used an Elinchrom Quadra S for the light source which was able to match the sun coming through the trees as my backlight.  Overall, I am really pleased with this umbrella!  It’s sturdy and easy to use.  When using with the Quadra, you have to use an adapter because the Quadra has a smaller post hole but it’s an easy fix and also saves the stress on the light since it’s a pretty large and heavy modifier.  The light fall efficiency was amazing!  I was able to pull f14 (as a test) from about 10 feet away.  I shot all of these images with the flash set to power 3.  Hope you enjoy the pics…

These 2 images were not using the flash.  You can see the difference.  They also required a little extra in Light room to help with contrast.  The other images have almost no post production at all!  Very basic raw corrections.