Category: Photograhpy 101

This year Adalyn’s school decided to create a yearbook as one of their fundraising efforts.  I think this is a great idea and I plan on offering to take the formal pictures of the kids.  Excited about the prospect of taking the formal shots, I purchased this dual sided collapsible muslin photo backdrop from Amazon thinking it would be perfect for the job.  Since it’s travel friendly I can throw it, along with an umbrella, ligthstand, and flash in my bag and have a decent mobile studio I can setup in minutes.  Here are a few test shots I took at home.  BTS at the bottom.

Of course Hunter got in on the action too.  🙂

Here’s a behind-the-scenes peek of the setup.

Say hello to Al.  My Sony Alpha A6000.  AKA: My Precioussss….

We’ve been best friends since shortly after Father’s Day (all the pictures on this blog since then have been taken with this camera).  Al is a BEAST.  Blazingly fast auto-focus, the option for full manual control, a hot-shoe for my flash, all in a lightweight and compact body.  I can carry this thing around all day.  It’s going to be a great camera to have on our family vacations.

It’s not all roses though.  The current lens selection of Sony E-Mounts is abysmal.  Luckily, I shoot mostly portraits of my kiddos at a relatively close range so the 35mm f1.8 and 50mm f1.8 are perfect for me.  However, if I wanted to shoot a kid’s sports game I’d be hard pressed to find a good quality zoom.  One that I could afford anyway.  The 70-200 f4 looks AMAZING but at twice the price of the camera itself, it’s a hard pill to swallow.  I think I would just rent one instead.

Anyway, this camera has been a joy to shoot with.  I’ve even been surprised by it’s automatic modes.  If you don’t want to think about ANYTHING you just set it to auto mode and turn on face detection and you’re all set.  Just point-and-shoot.  Seriously, I’ve even felt kind of guilty using face detection auto focus.  It almost feels like cheating.  🙂

Today, Kayla and I cleaned out the kiddo’s playroom.  We have a good size box full of toys to take to Goodwill and we can actually see the playroom floor!  We are super excited to have the room in good shape again and the kids had a blast rolling around on the padded floor.  Hunter was looking especially dapper playing with the foam blocks in his little overalls. You can even see his top two teeth starting to peak out!  ADORABLE!  🙂

Unfortunately we only have one small window in the playroom and since it was cloudy and raining there wasn’t much light coming through.  So I had no choice but to bust out my trusty flash and remote triggers.  I always hear people talk about how bad pictures look when they have their camera’s flash turned on.  I have to say, if they are using their built in flash, I tend to agree.  But when you use a flash off-camera you can create your own “window of light” on just about any neutral colored wall.  I turned off the overhead room light (to avoid white-balance issues) and blasted the wall directly to my left with a pretty strong burst of light.  I actually used two flashes so I could keep the power relatively low thus saving battery.  Like I mentioned before, using this technique you can create a “window of light” on just about any wall and your pictures will be well-lit and have nice soft shadows.  Here’s a little Behind-The-Scenes (BTS) look at what I’m talking about.

Here’s a snapshot of the kiddos showing off their block building skills.