Summer Fun

I've been taking my children to the Tennis Club of Albuquerque for swim lessons the last two weeks. A friend was taking her children and recommended it. This has been a great experience. I'd tried group and then private lessons with my son 2 and 3 years ago, and it had been pretty unsuccessful. He was terrified of putting his face in the water, and once forced to do that, he gave up. So I gave up on having someone else teach him!
The instructors here are phenomenal. They are incredibly patient and my son has gotten older. Both of my two oldest children have made a huge leap. My son now can't get enough, and he goes right into the water! My daughter finally has worked herself up to putting her face in with the patient work of her instructor.

Here are several snapshots of them in action. I was juggling watching/hanging on to my littlest one and the camera at the same time, but got a few photos while watching them:

We've also enjoyed some outdoor play. Here we enjoy the sprinkler hose in the backyard. In the first, I loved the colors in the sky and in my little one's clothes. I also like the lines of the water and of the balcony pillars behind her. My other daughter had a grand time playing by herself and challenging herself to get in the water!

And last of all, I loved the way the sunlight fell up my littlest one's hair as she played on a riding toy outside. I also like the background colors.

Posing

Posing isn't my biggest strength as a photographer. I also prefer to focus on capturing expressions over perfect poses. I'd rather people look like themselves than a perfectly posed model looking stagnant and with no story to tell. Also, when I am working with a family with small children or babies, I tend to focus on getting the little ones happy and it is easy to overlook the way their parents look! That said, however, some posing is required when you want photos that are flattering and that don't exaggerate in unflattering ways.

Another note is that our camera is translating what we see in 3D into a flat 2D picture. Think about that. While we see an entire person, and know how wide the person is, and can see how nice they look, the camera will only show the angle it sees.

Here I'm going to post a few tips that I try to keep in mind, but remember, there are plenty of times where "rules" are broken for effect, and it isn't wrong.

First and foremost, look at where the light falls. When we look at the human face, it looks most natural to us when the light falls at an angle from slightly above and either in front or to one side or the other. This is the way sunlight falls on our faces most of the time, and it emphasizes the shape of the face - the forehead, cheek bones, mouth, etc.

When I take a picture of the human face it is also more flattering for the camera to be slightly above. I want the eyes to be clear. I don't want to emphasize under the chin, and when someone is looking down, it is easy to produce what appears to be extra "chins"! This, of course, applies more to adults than to children. Sometimes we can produce fun pictures of kids from all angles.

If someone's body is posed slightly at an angle to the camera, the person's width isn't emphasized. Most of us appreciate that. My husband visited India for a month before we met. He showed me his photos. Every one with him in it shows him standing square to the camera in front of some neat place. He is a big guy (he's 6' 4"!) and these photos were not flattering at all. Try to look dynamic in a photo!

Groups: I used to make the mistake of lining everyone up like the old school photos. Tall people went in back, shorter in front. Everyone was in neat straight lines. This produces BORING photos! What you want is the faces arranged in such ways that they aren't in straight lines horizontally or vertically. If every face is at a slightly different level or even angle, the photo is a lot more interesting to look at. On another note, the faces should also all be at a similar distance from the camera, so you can keep them all in focus. It helps a lot to get up on a step stool (or other convenient object) so that you can put your camera at a level that makes the faces approximately the same distance from it.

Hands look better from the side than from the top - they don't look as large or as square.

Try not to cut off hands or feet that gives an "amputated" feel. If you crop, try to crop at a 3/4 ratio (across the upper arm or forearm, or middle of lower leg - but not at joints).

Last of all, You are the photographer. Try different angles, try different croppings. Don't get stuck on thinking you've got it with one shot. Take LOTS of photos, and then look through them to see what you like. It takes experimentation to learn. And have fun!

Family in Action

I enjoy the opportunity to capture families in action. This happy family came up with the idea to play a game while I was there. It was fun watching them interact and have fun together! A few shots I like:

July Special

I'm offering 100% of the session fee applied to print orders for just the month of July. Email to book now! emily@lonelymountainphotography.com

In Home Family Photo Session

This beautiful family took advantage of my June special. A big thank you to them for allowing me in their home to take pictures!

More Beautiful Children

I was blessed with the opportunity to photograph these children in their home on Saturday. We had a lot of fun. Here are just a few of my favorites:

Expression

The eyes reveal the soul

I and my family traveled to visit family for a couple of weeks. We had a good trip, but surprisingly, I took few photos. I have barely looked at them since we've returned home, but when I have a few ready, I will post them. Meanwhile, I thought I'd post several favorites that demonstrate a concept.

When you look at someone/ talk with someone, what do you look at? The eyes. A person's eyes are really the most important part of a portrait. If they are looking at you, this is where the critical focus of a portrait lies. If you are not focusing on them, the thing focused on is going to draw the viewer's attention. Of course, this is a choice you should make as the photographer. If you are not focusing on the eyes, it should be for an artistic reason. How many of you have seen a photo of yourself where your nose or some other feature seems more prominent than you'd like? Often the cause of this is that the focus is really on that, and not your eyes!

Just a few past photos:

Travel

I'm traveling with my family for two weeks. I'll post photos soon, when I return home! Take care and have a lovely Memorial Day.

Composition

I'd like to share a few tips about photo composition. The simplest technique or "rule" used in photography is called the "Rule of Thirds" and this is VERY closely related to "The Golden Mean" from which the rule of Thirds is really derived. Basically, mathematicians have studied what is naturally aesthetically pleasing in the world around us. Through this they have discovered that we often find that things are arranged in such a way as to be approximately placed in distances from each other to reach a ratio of 1:1.618.... Many people simplify this to the "rule of thirds" by saying in a given picture, if the interesting things are placed 1/3rd of the way from side to side or top to bottom (and vice versa), the photo hold much more interest than when the object of interest is placed dead center. An article that simplifies and gives examples is:
http://photoinf.com/Golden_Mean/Eugene_Ilchenko/GoldenSection.html

Another good discussion on the Golden Mean is:
 http://photoinf.com/Golden_Mean/Stuart_Low/The_Golden_Mean.htm

Here is an example where I placed my daughter (not literally) in the left third of the picture. With her there the sense of action is enhanced with you following her direction to the right where we see the water, her arms outstretched, the line of the creek following back then into her. Our eyes are kept moving around the picture.

 Here is an example of a photo I took of my daughter's feet in the water. The first shows her feet placed in the center. The second shows them placed to the left. Notice how when we view the first photo, our eyes see the feet and then don't know where to go next in the photo. In the second, with the placement of them on the left, our eyes are drawn right into the water, to the rock, up the right side of the frame to the out-of-focus ground on the top left, then across left to her hands holding the stick and then back to her feet. The photo holds more interest then the first one.

One more example of a combination of this and how we show action in a photo. If a person is moving, they need space to move into. Here my son is splashing in the water. He is moving to the left and we see the space, and it is filled with splashed water droplets. It is dynamic; he has somewhere to go and is going that way. I wish I hadn't gotten my daughter's arm in the photo on the right, but sometimes when you're catching action, you catch others in action too! I can photoshop it out of the photo, but haven't yet done that.

 

One more thing: It is hard to look at a photo where someone is looking out of the frame, but the edge of the frame is right next to their face. It is much more pleasing for them to have space to be looking or moving into.

Or one I took several years ago:

And here we see the eyes in the left third again, with our eyes being drawn around her arms and back.

As always, feel free to ask any questions. I'll try to answer :-) Take care.

June Special - model family search

I'm offering a special starting June 7 through the end of the month. I'm looking for families who are willing to let me come to their homes to photograph them. I will waive the session fee and offer a free 8x10 to each family. There is no requirement to purchase anything if you don't like the photos. The only requirement/request on my part is that you sign a release so I can use the photos for advertising, etc. I am trying to build up my portfolio of the type of photography I am interested in.

Let me know and take care :-)

Emily

Faces

I love capturing kids' expressions. I find that if you let kids be themselves in front of the camera and take lots of shots, you can get genuine expressions in their faces - expressions that are real and loved by their families. This sweet little boy was a lot of fun. He was trying out all sorts of expressions for me to photograph...

Aperture

I'd like to discuss aperture and speed this week. These two things are what the photographer is primarily controlling with the manual modes of a typical SLR camera. I talked about how light is everything. Aperture and Speed control how much light is allowed into the camera. This is where "stops" come in. A "full stop up" allows exactly twice as much light into the camera as the stop below. With modern digital slr cameras, our settings aren't set to full stops anymore. Often there are multiple fractions of stops, so the old understanding of twice as much light doesn't apply with all the numbers the camera shows.

Aperture controls the size of the opening when the shutter opens to allow light in. If you squint your eyes, you generally think you can see farther. It is this way with the camera. If the opening is large, the plane of focus is narrower. If the opening is small, the plane of focus becomes a much larger area. Here is an example of wide aperture:

Notice how thin the area is that is actually sharp. You can see the buttons on her dress, her face, her hand, and the plant are all fairly sharp. Her feet and everything in front and behind her start to get fuzzy. Here is another example:

Notice how blurry the railing behind her is. If you look closely, the front of her face is sharper than the top of her head or her ears.
In both of these I used an aperture of f/1.2. Notice that I placed the 1.2 as the denominator of the fraction. This is helpful. In your camera, aperture is just shown as the number. But you need to know that the SMALLER the number - the WIDER the aperture (because it is in actuality the denominator, and not a whole number). A lot of standard lenses only "stop down" to about f/4 or f/5.6. Notice we write it as f/number while the camera only shows us the number. Therefore an aperture (as seen in the camera) of 8 is actually a smaller opening than 4.

Now lets talk about Speed. This is referring to how fast the shutter opens and shuts to allow light in when you push the button. If the aperture remained the same, every time you changed the speed a full stop (note that on the old SLR cameras, the only options were full stops - this is no longer the case and when you dial the speed settings up or down, we actually see a lot more numbers, or fractions of stops) you let in twice as much light as the stop before it. Once again we will notice that the camera shows us only the denominator. For example: if it shows us "60" it means 1/60 of a second.

So, we use a combination of speed and aperture to define how much light we let in, and in the process we set the camera to take a faster or slower picture and also set it to have more or less of the picture in focus.

In the manual section on your dial, Av is where you set just the aperture and let the camera guess at the appropriate speed to let the right amount light in. Tv is where you set just the time (speed) and allow the camera to guess at the right aperture. M is where you set both yourself. I often work in Av mode, because I like to adjust the aperture as I like and then let the camera set the speed. I do have to watch the speed to make sure it isn't so slow that it shows my unsteadiness in holding the camera (blurriness) or movement of what I'm taking a picture of (unless that is what I want). There are times I set the speed to make really sure that the shutter can move fast enough to freeze the action. In the following example I still used Av mode, but I was watching to see what shutter speed it was using.

Here the aperture was f/2.8 (shown as 2.8 in the camera) and the speed was 1/2500th of a second. This speed froze the action of my son jumping through the air. We do not see any blurring of him. The camera opened and shut so fast that it caught a fraction of a moment and froze it in picture form.

If you look back to my blog post in mid March at the picture of my little girl in pink running, you'll see a lot of motion blur. The sharpest thing in the photo is her face. Her feet are a blur, her arms, and everything around her. In that photo I used an aperture of f/16 (Av mode) in order to get the speed very slow (1/25th of a second). I panned with her, keeping my focus on her face and slowly pushed the shutter. I was intentionally trying to capture a sense of the motion by keeping the shutter speed so slow that she was moving the whole time the shutter was open.

I hope that clarifies and explains a few things. Feel free to post questions and I'll do my best to help!