First ever Maternity Session

I was given the opportunity on Saturday to photograph a sweet couple expecting their first baby! A thank you to them for letting me share in their lives. Hopefully they, too, will be happy with a few of the photos. We photographed outside. Here are a few of my favorites:

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.

Light

I am going to be posting some tips about photography here as well as sharing photos. I love to help explain things to people and I'm always excited to share what I know with anyone who is interested.

     Photography is all about capturing light. It is light that bounces off things and give them color. It is light that falls on parts of the face to give it shape, and conversely it is the shadows in contrast to the light that define the shape of anything. A larger and closer light source will produce softer shadows. The sun is a small light source since it is very far away, producing hard (sharply defined and dark) shadows. Conversely, when you are looking into the shade (watch for sun patches if the shade is produced by a tree) the light is very soft because the actual light source is the sky, rather than the sun. Other good places for soft light are north facing windows, or anywhere on a cloudy day.
     Look at the direction of the light. If you are in a walled yard, the light is going to come from above, producing shadows in the eyes (if you are photographing a person). If you have an opening in front of a person, the light is lower and thus the direction of the light is more pleasing. One mistake I see a lot, is the use of the flash on the camera. It produces very flat light, produces red-eye (caused by the light bouncing off the retinas and returning directly to the camera), and dark shadows directly behind people. My tip, disable the flash, and instead look for good light. Soft, directional light coming from an angle will not produce the red eyes and will make much softer shadows.

Here is a photo I took this week of my daughter. I'm impressed with the high ISO capability of my camera. Most cameras couldn't do this with such little light. The higher the ISO setting, the more light sensitive is the sensor in the camera. However, the picture gets grainier and grainier looking the higher the ISO. Here my camera is set at 6400 ISO, aperture of f/2, shutter speed of 1/100 second. I was using a 135mm lens. The relatively slow shutter speed required me to hold the camera as still as possible (so you wouldn't get blurring) so I was braced in a nearby doorway. The sun had just set, and her face was lit by a northwest facing window. The stairwell was behind her (you can see the bars of the railing faintly) and there is an orange light coming up from below. Note the light of normal light bulbs is pretty yellow as compared to regular daylight. I love the shallow depth of field and colors in this picture.