Christmas 2013 has come and gone. Hope everyone had an awesome holiday with family and friends. I love this time of the year! Spending time with family, seeing friends who have just come back from school, seeing how festive everyone gets, the lights, the snow, it's a beautiful time. With these festive times comes festive photos! I decided to do a shoot that had to deal with christmas lights and bokeh. So I decided to use this really interesting gift box that had some awesome designs and the texture was really cool.

This shot was a really easy one to shoot. I only used one speed light (580EXII) camera right at 1/64 power with a piece of white foam core on the left side to fill in some of the shadows on the boxes lid. I used my Canon 7D 1/30 shutter at f/2.8 ISO 100. I shot this using my Christmas Gift!

The best gift of all this christmas was finally getting my first L-Series Lens. A Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II. Im super excited about this. I love the lens! It has a great sturdy build and the sharpness is amazing. On top of that the bokeh it gives is beautiful. After doing that gift box photo I decided to do a festive photo with the L lens itself.

Using the same setup as before, all I did was add another speedlight (430EXII) at 1/64 power to camera left.

Well thats it. Hope everyone has a happy new year and a good coming year! 2014 should be interesting.

-Erik Holowicki

Chistmas Time