More Family Pictures

Shortly after taking the Frerichs pictures, I took pictures for my family, mainly due to my grandparents visiting. In addition to getting some good pictures, it also gave us a fun adventure as a family allowing us to get out of the house for awhile. Because I sort of had to be in the pictures (seeing as it is my family) I brought along my wireless triggers. I had recently purchased some new radio triggers from Yongnuo, which I grew to prefer over my Nikon brand infrared trigger. The radio triggers allow me to hold my hand behind myself or someone else, rather that have to have the remote exposed to the lens (as in the case of the IR remote), where it appears in the photo. This results in more natural looking pictures where my hand isn't obviously holding a remote. (click images to view larger)

Later, I was asked  by the Andersons, another missionary family, to take pictures for their prayer card. They were a lot of fun to work with, and were always full of smiles.

They also came up with a few fun and very good poses. In addition, Mr. Anderson had the idea to take a picture of me taking a picture of them. Due to my lack of a second camera, I took out me telephoto lens, and held it in a way as to hide the fact that it was just the lens. Mr. Anderson's angle of taking the picture made it work perfectly, and I ended up with a good picture just for myself as well.

Probably due to a bad choice of angle in relation to the sun, this on came out too bright and hence looks a little off due to my attempts at darkening it.

As far as lessons learned on this shoot, I learned that a large aperture is not always best. I absolutely love a good blurry background behind sharp subjects, however this is not always needed. Even when it is needed, using too shallow a depth of field on a group may leave some people out of focus, as was the case with some of my pictures for this shoot. I had been shooting in Aperture Priority mode in order to keep my aperture as wide open as possible, but realized that I need to monitor it so that I don't throw too much out of focus. Now, I continue to shoot in Aperture Priority, but keep the aperture no larger than about f/6.3-8 for groups. For individuals, I may on occasion drop it back down to f/3.5.

Fortunately, this picture was one of the worst, as I did have better ones to work with. However, none came out perfectly sharp.

Frerichs Family Pictures

  So, keeping up with a blog has been way harder then I would have imagined! Nevertheless, I finally had time to put together another. Over the past few weeks, I have been busy with school, other activities, and plenty of pictures! About three weeks ago I had the opportunity to take pictures for the Frerichs family as they needed pictures for their prayer card as they will be leaving on furlough in a month. I have also been busy with other shoots of which I will post later.

 I was exited the be able to do the Frerichs' pictures again after having done them some time last year. After looking back at the pictures I had taken then, I was confident that I could make them much better this year. I have had much more experience and have improved much since then.

  It is fun being able to take pictures of friends as it is much more fun, for them and me. They were very easy to work with and helped a lot with figuring out how to pose themselves, as that is one thing that I'm not very good at.

They seemed to prefer taking pictures in the shade and made fast enemies of my reflector when I pulled it out to add a little light. The reflector, which I just recently bought, is a very handy tool to add light where needed. I think I used it twice on this shoot, once when it was too dark in the shade where they were, and again when I had them sit in the sun at almost a ninety degree angle. In the later case, I had taken a few pictures then looked at the back of my camera to check my exposure. I noticed that because of where Jessica and Jordan were sitting, that the sun didn't hit their faces the same way it did the others. So I pulled out the reflector and added a bit of light to them

In post processing, I came to love Photoshop Element's clone stamp and heal tools so much more! Because Lima is a desert, getting pictures with a lot of green requires finding a park to shoot at. This last time, the park wasn't too busy, but there were still some people in the background of some pictures, as well as cars parked along side of the park. These tools made it very easy to remove these objects from the background.

Fetzer Yard Sale

This last Saturday, Fetzer (the missionary-kid school here in Lima) hosted its annual yard sale. My shutter finger has been itching lately, so I took my camera for the day. Yard sales are not common in Peru, and due to the culture here, it can be very different. Doors open very early for the missionaries who are selling stuff, and at nine o'clock the check-out table opens for missionaries who are buying from others. At ten o'clock, they open the front doors to the Peruvians, who are admitted by invitation only. Even though most are invited by missionaries from their churches, precautions still have to be taken to prevent theft. When the Peruvians enter, there is a station set up for them to drop off their bags, so they don't hide items inside to walk off with. Also, we normally station a person or two at the bathroom entrance to make sure people don't take clothes in to "try on," to prevent them from putting the clothes on under their own.

Tim talking as he was guarding the bathrooms

Many people will come in, looking for anything that looks interesting, then will take large piles to the grassy area to sort through.

With so many people and tables around, I was able to just station myself here and there and get quite a few shots. Often camping on one person until the background was clear and they were positioned properly.

Items have tags on them, color coded to each family that was selling. 

 Once they have found what they like and don't like, they'll what they don't buy on the grass. This creates more jobs, as we have to have people take items back to the appropriate tables for more people to browse through.

After the line had gotten quite long (as shown above) the cashiers opened one lane as a speed lane.

At the checkout, the cashiers total the prices on the tags, and charge the customer once. They then take the tags off and send them to a back room where they are separated by seller and totaled. Afterwards, the sellers are paid based on the totals of the tags.

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