Week 13 - Children {Eagan Photographer}

I love children's photography so was happy when this week's theme was "children."  The neighbor kids know that I love to photograph them and fortunately they like to be photographed! 


The weather warmed up enough one day this week to bring out the kids...


I asked the younger kids to stand on a retaining wall to compose this first shot.
f 5.0 (so that everyone would be in focus)
ISO 250
White balance: shade
1/400 sec (it's good to use a little faster shutter speed when photographing kids)
135mm (used the 70 - 200mm lens)

The younger kids didn't want to hang around for any more pictures! But the older ones were willing to smile and say, "Hey."  That's a little trick I learned from Noemi H...have your clients smile and say "Hey" and you get those fun smiles where people look really happy! Try it!

I asked the kids to pull away from the pine trees. I wanted the pine trees far enough back so that they would be blurry (this is another trick to simplify your background and get that nice blur...have the background a good distance away from your subject). I left the aperture at 5.0 so that the kids would still be in great focus. 

The kids were running and I knew I'd need a faster shutter speed to stop their action and not be blurred. I increased my ISO to 800. It was a cloudy day anyway. By increasing the ISO, I had a shutter speed of 1/3200 - plenty of speed to stop their action. I generally aim for 1/2000 to stop action (e.g. when groups or individuals jump up in the air and you don't want any blur...make sure your shutter speed is up near 1/2000 of a second). BTW, if you wonder why I share all this photo info...it's because I have some young friends getting into photography and they like to learn these kinds of things. I hope I'm not boring the rest of you!

I stood up on that retaining wall to get a shot from a different angle of Joanna.

She was climbing a prickly pine tree in this last shot.

I'm sure you'll see more of these kids in future posts!


Next week's photo challenge is to take a picture with the theme "excitement." If you want to join me in capturing "excitement", feel free to post one photo on my Facebook wall by midnight, April 10.