Another couple of photos from Yesterday’s blog post was all about having a little patience in trying to get a candid portrait of somebody. Today’s is about the opposite – the need to be able to react quickly to get a candid portrait of somebody. Or in this case a candid portrait of two people, two generations apart. As you can see above, it was quite successful, and of all the photos I’ve taken recently this stands out as one that really does capture a moment.
Like yesterday’s photo is was taken at a barbeque in Cork a couple of weeks ago, and the subjects are my nephew (and godson) Samuel, who’s a frequent model on these pages, and his grandfather (and my father) who has appeared here in the past also.
The photograph itself tells all you need to know about the circumstances, and I love the look of total enjoyment and adoration on Samuel’s face. To capture it I had to be quick, but more importantly I had to be very lucky.
I had switched back from manual exposure mode to aperture-priority mode after the photograph of Abbie that i posted yesterday, which had been taken a few minutes earlier, so the exposure was handled by the camera. Fortunately there was nothing offensive in the scene in terms of a bright back light or anything that would confuse the camera’s meter, and it got the exposure pretty well tied down. Just before I shot the frame I stepped the aperture down a stop or so from its widest, to add a little more depth of field – this was a quick turn of the dial as I lifted the camera to my eye, rather than anything slow and deliberate, and I ended up at f/4.5. Given the angle I was shooting from relative to the subjects, any increase to the depth of field of the shot would be good, and be more forgiving of my focus, which is what tends to suffer most in these fast-reaction-time shots.
In the end, the shot worked out well, and is one to be printed I think.
It wasn’t the only photo of Samuel that I took, and when he was enjoying the swing I had fun taking pictures of him as he swung towards and away from my camera, with the continuous 3D tracking focus of my D700 doing a particularly good job of keeping him sharp.
In between the shots of him looking towards the camera (probably thinking “there he goes again with that camera”) I was lucky enough to capture this photo, which I think is calling out for the title “So how does this thing work exactly?”
And in case you’re interested in the settings for this it was shot at f/2.8, with a shutter speed of 1/500s and an ISO of 200. The same lens was used as for the other shot (the only lens I used that day) but the focal length of this one is about 50mm.
Note the two men in Samuel’s hands in both photographs – he was obviously enjoying their company as much as he was enjoying that of his grandfather!
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