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Day 112: Facing My (Photography) Demons

We travelled to London for a big extended family meet up today. The kids' Aunty G has had a big birthday recently and she always likes to have a Halloween themed party for the whole family. It was a fantastic day and the kids had a blast. 

After our trip to Legoland, I concluded that these big busy family meet ups are very tricky from a photography point of view. There is just so much going on and the kids are super zippy. I had all that going on today, plus a few other of my photography problem spots crept in too. 

The day started off well enough with indoor shots. I was merrily shooting away with an aperture of about f/5.6 using BBF. Aunty G and Uncle S' place has lots of natural light, which felt like a luxury. It is also beautifully decorated with no kids clutter everywhere. I would love to do a photo shoot there with my kids on their own - without the face paint!

Oh yes, we set the kids free with some face paint. 

 


We enjoyed a bit of the old toilet paper mummy game. It got messy real fast and quickly turned into a toilet paper "snowball" fight. 






My husband was dressed as a horse ... of course!


The kids found this pretty hillarious, except for poor Bear who was absolutely terrified of her daddy .....horsing around. Okay, I'll stop now. 


These two were taken by my husband on full Auto mode. I was interested to see what choices the camera made. I definatly would have gone higher than 1/50, but it worked out reasonably well here. Then again I think that my husband has a pretty steady hand and Roo was moving slowly. I always love my husband's compositions. I think that he has a natural eye for a good photo. 

f/2; 1/50; ISO 200

f/2.5; 1/50; ISO 200

Later on we all went out to the park. This is were things got very tricky for me. The light was variable with the sun ducking in and out of the clouds. When it was out it was directly overhead and casting shadows over faces. My exposure was all over the place and kids were too fast to capture. 




In the end, just as I was about to fling the camera away in disgust, I switched to TV mode and relaxed a bit. I drove the shutter speed up to 1/400 and set the ISO to 100. If I had my time back, I think that I would have experimented with an ISO of 200 or 400. 

Even with the easier setting, I still had the issue of the big bright sky in the background. I played around a bit with the metering settings, but I am not sure that I was really in control of my pictures. I also followed the advice of a Clickin Moms article and kept my focal point on the centre. Supposedly the outer toggle points don't work so well with back lit subjects because they don't pick up contrast so well. 




At least I was capturing motion. 






There was also a lot of glare, which was throwing my colours off. 



This is Aunty G and Uncle S. We had such a lovely day with them. xx








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