My original goal in learning portrait photography was to take amazing photos of our kids.  I can’t say that I’ve been much of a superhero fan up until then, but Wyatt fell in love with them very early on.  Since getting a couple of superhero capes on Amazon, we started seeing the kids running around the house with them on.  It was at this point, that the idea clicked about it being a perfect photoshoot idea.

The thing about watching superheroes is that you can detach yourself from reality and become an out-of-this-world character.  From a kid-standpoint, they are the perfect adventure and we’ve embraced all of them (in addition to dinosaurs and every streaming cartoon).

To do this shoot, I wanted to create a world that looked unlike anything else.  The best part about using professional lighting is that we can create that scene just about anywhere.  In this case, we headed out to the front yard near our cul-de-sac.  We had a fog machine we bought for Halloween the previous year and it was a key element in the lighting recipe.  Fog (or anything in the air) captures the light instead of letting it pass through unabated.

We used two flashes behind the kids with colored gels to create the background scene.  We then used a softbox from a company called MagMod to provide the overall light on the kids.  In this case, I was able to darken the background and make it blue through the use of a transparent color in front of our main light.  For the technical specifics, I shot with a white balance of 3200K and used a full CTO gel in front of our flash.

Enjoy!