Take What You Can Get

When it comes to taking pictures of my son, I'll pretty much take whatever I can get. Usually, if I point a camera in his face, he gets as far away from me as he can. When he does let me take a picture of him, his fake smile and obvious discomfort makes any picture generally unusable. The trick is catching him completely off guard.

Last week we were extremely proud to watch him receive an accomodation for making honor roll. I was feeling quite under the weather and not really in a pic taking mood, plus I figured we'd be too far away from the action to get a good shot (I STILL don't own a lens bigger than 105mm since switching to Canon). My wife was obviously annoyed at the fact that the family photog wasn't bringing a camera to this very special event, so I caved and brought it along.

The lights were fairly bright in the gymnasium where this was taking place. Since I always like trying to see how far I can push the 5D Mark II without using a flash, I left the flash off. My son was relatively nearby when I grabbed this shot. As expected, I was too far away to get a decent shot of him receiving his certificate.

The pic above was taken at 99mm 1/80 sec, f4, ISO 2000. I added the vignette in post.

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