Five Tips for Fall Photo Fun

October 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Fall is one of my favorite times to take pictures, especially here in Minnesota, because it’s so ding dang gorgeous outside. Throw on some plaid, grab some scarves and vests, and it’s hard to go wrong.

Last weekend I met up with my friends Tina and Jill and their families over in Silverwood Park (an amazing park to which I had never been!), for some fun photos.

1. Go Wide

If you don’t have a wide angle lens, rent one! I rented a Canon 20mm f/2.8  from a local photography store, and though I had to write a check for the value of the lens when I checked it out, when I brought it back my actual fee was $15. (They tore up the deposit check.)

Wide angle is great because you can get more of the background (and the background is what makes taking outdoor fall photos so great!), and it allows you to get a lot of people in a close up frame.

(If you don’t have a local shop where you can rent something for the weekend, I’ve had good luck with borrowlenses.com.)

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2. Be Creative

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Why not bring bags of popcorn, apple cider, and apples into the park? And this adorable little owl?

When we chatted over email about taking fall pictures, Jill mentioned that she had some burlap we could put down over a table, and it grew from there. The kids loved the adventure of it, which led to some fun photo ops.

3. Incorporate Color

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The red apples created a great pop against the brown, oranges, and yellows of the fall surroundings. Maybe you have a bright blue scarf, or your kiddo has apple green wellies. Color makes everything better.

4. Find the Light

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It’s all about the light. Don’t be afraid to have the sun at your subjects’ backs, especially when you’re in tree cover, because magical things can happen when it peeks through the leaves.

I also love the hazy glow the light can create in the late afternoon as it approaches the horizon. I tend to shoot pretty wide open, and I love the things that can happen.

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5. Have Fun!

And most of all. Have fun! Friends can make any shoot fun.

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Before & After — Canon Rebel Edition

November 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

So at the State Fair back in September, my Canon 5D had an unfortunate encounter with a leaky sippy cup. It hasn’t worked since (sob!), and while I do plan to send it in to Canon, I also managed to get rid of the box in some cleaning/purging fit, and who has time to even go to the post office?

So in the meantime, I’ve had to go back to my old Rebel. (Which I am very grateful to still have.)

I’ve had to get used to a crop sensor again (the 5D is full frame). The Rebel lets in less light and creates a lot more noise when shooting at higher ISOs, but it does make for some good before and after examples.

Before:

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After:

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The after is still very noisy, but it was really underexposed to begin with, and the kid is so cute, who cares?

{I am thankful for …}

3. Being able to capture simple moments and make them forever memories.

 
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Before & After — Baby in a Wagon

September 2, 2010 By 8 Comments

Before:

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After:

Ooof that SOOC was underexposed! For this one, I just played around in Lightroom until I liked it. I typically don’t process my images with a tint or a vintage-like style, but I liked the way this one turned out.

Shot with a Canon 5D + 100mm macro. Edited in Lightroom. (Headband by Karly’s Kloset.)

Before & After blog hop on Pixel Perfect.

 
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Treasure Chest

August 20, 2010 By 6 Comments

I come by my love of photography honestly. My dad was always taking pictures when we were kids, and I remember as a teenager getting my hands on his SLR and burning through rolls of film, just in love with the continuous shooting and the sound of the shutter.

Recently, my dad has been working through his boxes (and boxes and boxes) of slides getting them scanned in to digital files. He was in town yesterday, and gave me two DVDs of his progress thus far. They are amazing, and I hope someday that our children will appreciate my incessant photo taking as much as I appreciate my dad’s huge archive of images.

My dad and mom moved from Ohio to Utah in the mid-1960s so that my dad could attend graduate school at Brigham Young. (He was one of only a handful of non-LDS students there.) They lived in a few different places in Utah (including a one-room apartment behind a gas station in Provo). From there they moved to New Orleans where my dad worked for Shell Oil. In those early years, he traveled quite a bit with Shell for continuing education classes around the United States, as well as to places like London and Borneo. So he has a lot of cool old shots.

London, late 60s/early 70s:

Like this one, of the Superdome as it went up in the early 1970s, taken from his office in the Shell building:

My dad got his pilot’s license at age 17 and has had a lifelong love of flying, aircrafts and airports. The bulk of his slides are shots taken either from an airplane window (most of which he was piloting) or are of airshows or old airports.

LAX (early ’70s?):

Aireal shot of Toledo (I think!):

My grandfather was also somewhat of a shutter bug, and it’s incredible how crisp and clear the colors still are, in some cases, 65 years later. Film! It’s amazing.

My uncle at age 4 in 1942ish. I just love this image — the lighting, composition, his skeptical expression:

On one of my grandfather’s many fishing trips (the colors!):

My dad (right) and his brother, Bruce:

My dad (I assume taken by my grandfather, as he is in some other shots):

And of course it’s the family photos that are the real treasure.

Mom & me:

They took that dog everywhere:

And seeing my parents, young, happy and in love? Well, these are priceless to me:

It is what I love most about photography. That you can capture a moment in time and make it last forever.

 
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Aperture and Focal Points — F-Stop Friday

August 13, 2010 By 1 Comment

When Lauren and I were in Stillwater on Sunday, we took some pictures down by the St. Croix River. (The body of water that serves as the border between Minnesota and Wisconsin.)

I almost always shoot at f/3.2 or wider. No particular reason, I just do. I’m actually trying to not do this as much, as not every image needs a creamy, blurry background. Since it was a sunny day, I had to keep my ISO low (100) and my shutter speed pretty fast so that all my images wouldn’t be blown out.

This one was shot at f/2.8 using my 50mm 1.4:

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I like it because, while the background is blurry, you can still get a sense of the scene. (That I’m beside a river, and there’s a boat in the background and people walking along the river.) But you can’t see a lot of detail. And maybe I want to show exactly where I am, without changing the composition of my image.

There are two ways to do this. The first is by simply changing where I set my focal point. So for fun, I switched my focal point from the far left (bottom in this case since the shots are vertical) to far right (top):

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In this image, my f-stop was actually f/1.8, but because what I’ve set my focal point on is so far away from me, more of the scene is in focus.

Depth of field is fairly mathematical. As in, you can find charts and graphs about where to set your aperture depending on how far you are from your subject. And to be honest I don’t understand all the math about it, but there are more variables than just your aperture. Your distance from the subject and on what part of the scene you’re focusing (and the rest of the exposure triangle — shutter speed and ISO) also all come into play. Math!

For a really clear example of how DOF can really change an image, I shot two exposures back to back, first wide open at f/1.4 and then with a much narrower aperture of f/11.

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Quite a difference, right? I actually prefer the image with the narrower aperture (f/11), as you get a real sense of what it was like that day by the river. (In a VAN down by the RIVER. This is a required quote when you’re down by a river. RIP Chris Farley.)

So get out there and change up your aperture and play with manually setting your focal points (read your manual if you don’t know how!) and see what you can do!

 
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