Busy couple of weeks

The last couple of weeks have been busy. Last weekend I was out of town, and did the photography for the wedding of very dear friends. My children happened to be in the wedding as well.

And baby sister afterward:

During the ceremony, white balance was tough. There were the normal interior (orange-yellow) lights inside and the bluish light coming through the windows from the sky. With no white walls to bounce my flash off of, I relied on the lights combined with some fill flash from my camera. With all those different colors of light, black and white generally worked best.

Today, I took some shots of my children running on the porch, or dancing.

Let me talk a little about focusing on moving subjects. It's tricky! With the autofocus ability of DSLRs, comes an ability that manual cameras of the past could never had. And the auto-focus is continually being improved with the continued advancement of digital camera technology. Basically, we can now set our cameras on AI Servo, which means that your camera will continually adjust its focus on whatever you keep your focus point on (keep the camera with the subject). With my camera, it is easier to keep a subject in focus that is moving from side to side than coming straight at me!

That brings up the subject of focus. You want your subject to be sharp, clear - in focus. You don't want the thing behind to be sharper than what you are actually trying to photograph. Play around with your menus and figure out how to change the focus point from "everything" to one dot in the center. Some cameras have a button labeled with a picture of a rectangle with dots inside it. If you push this, the default is generally to show lots of dots in the rectangle that shows up on the screen (or in the viewfinder). You don't want this. You want to manipulate the controls so it changes to one spot. Center focus is generally the easiest to use. This means that your camera will try to focus on whatever falls under that center point. On most cameras you press half-way down to make the camera focus. Once you do press down half-way, you can change your composition (keeping the shutter half-pressed) and keep the plane of focus relatively the same before pushing all the way down to take the picture. This is for a still photo, with still subjects.

In these pictures I set the camera to AI Servo, kept the center on the moving child and kept clicking the shutter button. There is no focusing and recomposing with this mode because the camera is continually adjusting the focus. So you have to keep your focus point on the moving subject.