Going back to Easter Sunday recently I *could* have written about photos of my kids rampaging around the garden hunting for Easter eggs…

…instead we have my nephew taking a pic of my partner filming the kids rampaging around the garden…

A chance photo taken with a 300mm lens is usually a good thing – I hadn’t intended posting this to my site, but felt it worked once I had given it the black & white treatment.

Minimal changes in Photoshop came up with an interesting image, if only someone had taken a photo of me taking a photo of my nephew etc etc…

DSLR-A200:f/5.6:1/320″:90.0mm:ISO 100

So when I had my first “proper” digital camera with a good optical zoom, I could start experimenting. This first camera was an Olympus SP57 OUZ “bridge” with a zoom of approximately 520mm… although it seemed smaller than that to me.

During a holiday to Brittany, when my son was just 2 years old, one evening walking on the beach the lighting was excellent… lovely and golden despite being in the middle of March. So by chance, using the zoom, I shot a natural portrait of him. He didn’t even know I’d taken a photo and that was the best thing!

Distancing yourself from the kids can only a be a good thing. You get such a natural photo, a normal expression… none of the usual face pulling and with some luck they’ve not closed their eyes as you take that cructial moment.

Even if they know you have a camera in your hands, you can still get away with it. But it can take maybe 10 shots, to get a good one. In the old days before digital that would just be called a total waste of film. Today of course, it doesn’t matter…

A change of camera moved me from the bridge to using a digital SLR, after my Olympus developed a fault. Having used a bridge, I’m now starting to prefer my Sony A200 DSLR and recent purchase of a Tamron 300mm zoom lens. Unlike a bridge you can buy lots of add-on accessories to give more flexibilty, although the drop from 520 to 300mm zoom capability hasn’t affected taking portraits so much and is more than adequate.

Of course, the Tamron lens is a whole lot longer than the retractable zoom on the bridge camera – so it does stick out a lot when taking photos. It is also a lot heavier and so holding the camera steady presents a lot of challenges.

Still, I continue to take far off portraits of my children and the snowy Winter this year provided some great oppotunities.

But so far, I’ve taken all my portraits outdoors… which seems logical as having a lot more light does help. However, with my DSLR you can uprate the ISO to as much as 3200 and depending on the lens drop down the f stop to quite a low figure. It is usually better to lower the latter as upping the ISO can not only produce a grainy photo, but can limit you if the subject moves slightly even, with blurring. So taking photos of children presents yet more challenges.

However, being in the same room with a 300mm lens means that you have to be some distance from the subject and sometimes you can just take a snap at that right moment. I’ve not really tried doing that with my children in a confined indoor space, as they just move around too much still. However people sitting at a dinner table can provide some interesting portraits and even though they know you have a camera, they probably do not even realise quite how close to them you are as you look through the viewfinder!

So why not give some natural portraits a try with your zoom and post your findings and observations in the comments section?

Would love to hear how you got on!

My daughter seems to love the comfort of our dogs basket, much to the bemused annoyance of Toffee… She’s a lovely dog though and takes it all in her stride, patiently waiting… waiting… waiting…

Like an earlier photo of my daughter, the light is coming from a window behind the subject(s), upping the ISO took care of this to some extent, but so did using the Shadows/Highlights dialogue in Photoshop Elements 10 under the Enhance menu.

This allowed me to lighten up certain important parts around the dogs head and my daughters face which are both well in shadow.

Also I used the clone tool to clean the tiled floor a bit, proving that this Home Dad needed to do some cleaning… I only wish it was as easy in real life!

DSLR-A200:f/5.6:1/25″:50.0mm:ISO 800

Our friends son, Lilian had fun in the garden today with our two.

More catching up from the weekend, plus my print job went off yesterday. More anon about that.

Here we have a depth of field photo taken with my Tamron 300mm lens, where due to the branches in the foreground, I focused the shot manually. As children move quickly, including little Lilian, I upped the ISO. Lighting wasn’t brilliant either that day.

Post production just involved adding a little more contrast to bring out his face a little.

DSLR-A200:f/6.3:1/640″:300.0mm:ISO 3200

Have not been taking a photo each day for a little bit and those images I have taken have stayed on the back burner, so a bit of a catch up… School holidays plus typesetting work on the local village magazine has kept me busy. That has now gone to print, so I have a little bit of spare time again.

So here I am… with a photo of my daughter, taken on our walk back home from dropping my son off at Judo this evening.

Taken with the little Nikon, I have made the best of an over-exposed job. Enhancing the bright colours of her coat and giving more contrast so she really stands out on this photo.

Took a good 5 minutes to get the right pose though, still a natural portrait shot as she wasn’t really aware I was taking a photo! I love the angle too. What do you think?

COOLPIX S2500:f/3.2:1/30″:4.9mm:ISO 250

By 1980, when I first used the camera, it was taking fast obsolete 127 film which had quite large 4cm x 4cm negatives. Much of the time I only had 12 exposure colour film, mainly because it was quite expensive. Although the camera had a little lever on the front so both black & white or colour film could be used.

A friend of my Dad’s who was a bus enthusiast, offered to take me on a “bus trip” around depots in north Nottinghamshire. Having just been given the camera I was really keen to try it out. Some of resulting photos were not too bad from the Agiflash on that trip, although the rubber camera case around it posed a bit of a problem. The triangular shaped flap on the cover got into shot on about half of the photos I took… and one shot was ruined by someone walking in front of me. Still, it was a big adventure at the time and it was like Christmas when the prints came back from the processors.

Here’s a selection of the photos I still have from that trip… don’t forget that I was only 10 years old when I took them!

This last photo, was one of those affected by the phantom camera flap problem… A few years ago I photoshopped out the resulting black triangle, with mixed results. Still, I feel I have to rescue a photo when I can!

Later on the wind on mechanism gave up the ghost, so my Dad drilled a hole in the top of the alloy casing and fitted a small aluminum tube with a groove in the end which lined up with the film spool. So the exposures were wound on by turning this tube and looking at the little red window on the back to line up the film number in it.

After a very wet Friday, the afterglow of daylight fading to night made up for a very grey and dismal day…

Even though I opened up the ISO of this shot to 1600, there was enough light at 7.50pm to take this at a fast shutter speed. After that it was a case of giving the image more contast in Photoshop to get that interesting “silhouette look”. The “Shadows & Hi-lights” menu came into use here too.

DSLR-A200:f/5:1/400″:230.0mm:ISO 1600

My daughter calmly reading Tchoupi and almost unaware that I was taking her photo… that’s how I like it!

As for the mess… I’ll forgive her just this time.

Uprating the camera to 3200 ISO helped to get all the available light for the shot, despite my daughter sitting in front of a well lit large window. In Photoshop I used the “Convert to Black & White > Scenic Landscape” option. Then altered the contrast slightly to give the image more definition.

Three shots were needed to get the right expression on her face.

DSLR-A200:f/5.6:1/40″:70.0mm:ISO 3200

Meet next doors cat…

The cheeky so and so loves our garden so much that it is almost a permanent resident. Despite the fact that we have a dog… that doesn’t like it one little bit.

Soon I’m going to start charging it rent!

Another chance photo taken from my office window using the 300mm lens. It was already a good photo, but I felt it looked better with a few enhancements in Photoshop notably enhancing the colour saturation and contrast.

DSLR-A200:f/5.6:1/500″:300.0mm:ISO 200

It struck me after I quickly took this photo this afternoon, and arrived home and dowloaded it to my PC, that this could have been taken anytime and in anyplace.

You could be in any European country… perhaps Russia even… the photo could have been taken at anytime in the last 50 years or so. Having a little play, I decided to add a few black and white bits to frame the whole shot leaving the colour in the centre and the martian-looking (Jeff Wayne?) “War of the Worlds” monsters imposing themselves on the landscape.

Taken with my little Nikon Coolpix, the original shot was very dark, reflecting the horribly dull lighting we’ve got this afternoon.

COOLPIX S2500:f/4.8:1/80″:9.8mm:ISO 80