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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More Tunnel Light

If this pic looks very similar to this one of my daughter, there's a reason.

Alex and his Mom described a picture they wanted me to make and showed me an example of one they had done previously; Alex looking down with the light coming in from the left, background out of focus. I tried photographing Julia in the tunnel to see how it would look before I suggested this to Alex.

I had Alex meet me at 7:00pm at Adriatica to do the shot. I noticed it was starting to get cloudy and could see a storm moving in in the distance. Alex arrived just as the rain started so I figured we might as well see what we can do anyway. The big problem was light. The dark clouds from the storm cut the light to almost 50% of what I was expecting to get.

This is where the 5D Mark II really came in handy. I borrowed a friends 50mm f1.4 and pushed the ISO up to 1600. This was the result. Not bad considering the light was very limited. In the raw image I could see just a little bit of grain when I zoomed in on the picture, but I was able to get rid of most of it using Lightroom, as well as converting the image to black & white.