FUN ON THE BEACH

When I am shooting a session, I always like to think about the story.  And while it is very difficult to tell a whole story in a single picture, it becomes easier with multiple pictures, or a picture collage.  Here is an example of a picture collage taken on a beach close to sunset and I wanted to capture the fun this mother and son were having.  I wanted to supplement the middle picture which is likely my favorite of the series because you can see them both smiling/laughing and clearly have a great time with a couple of pictures that added a bit:  the shy boy who did not want his picture taken on the left, and the cajoled boy sort of willing to look at the camera on the right.  For this series I also wanted a strong sense of motion, but without using blurring as a visual effect.

Photographer Technical:  For this sequence, I simply had the mother swing around in circles and dance on the beach with her son.  The sun was setting generating a soft light.  Because she was in motion and I wanted relatively sharp images, I pushed the shutter speed up to 1/1250 sec.  In order to get enough light I opened the lens to f2.8 and pushed my ISO up to 1000.  My D700 was set on continuous autofocus with the shutter released when then camera thinks it is in focus (a1 AF-C priority selection set to ‘Focus’).  I use spot focus with the spot following the people.  It is important to understand that the subject is in motion, not only turning, but also moving from left to right.  This requires that I panned the camera to follow the subject.

Many photographers think about the high ISO capabilities of D700 in terms of low light situations, but this is another situation (need for high shutter speed) where the high ISO capabilities really allows one to captures pictures that might not have been possible.

Lastly, I converted the picture to black & white with nik Silver Efex Pro as a filter in Photoshop CS5.