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