The Christmas holiday brings the one opportunity of the year to update family portraits as it is the only time that the extended family gathers together for a few days.  This year Edin helped me set up our studio lighting and background to get some fresh looking high key portraits for my wife and her sister to share with family overseas. The white background was lit with a single Nikon SB900 running 2 stops brighter than the main lights, one a SB800 and the other a SB600, both in umbrella soft boxes. All controlled by an infra-red SU800 with the D800 in manual mode- ISO 200, 1/250s at f5.6 using the Sigma 85mm f1.4 which has completely usurped my previous portrait favourite Nikon 70-200 f2.8VR2, due to it’s stunning sharpness and easier handing. I find using everything in manual mode it is a quick process using the histogram to get the light levels correct. The lesson I learned this time was to use the SB900 with external battery pack on the background as it was the hardest working light so was slowing things down when I was using the usual SB600 which was comparatively slow to cycle even with freshly recharged a  batteries. I had a couple of shots where we had good expressions but the BG flash had not fully recycled increasing the work in post-production. Once I had the SB900 on the background recycle time became a non-issue. A quick pass through Portrait Professional for minimal skin smoothing and eye brightening and all done.