MomShots

That kind of sounds like a Dick and Jane title.  See Jane focus.  See Jane snap a MomShot of their children.

Anyway what I wanted to share with you was a couple of photos I took the other day.  I took the boys out for a walk and we found a fun hill to climb and play on.  I had a lot of fun playing with my camera while they enjoyed the snow.

This first shot is one I find interesting.  I love that Uly and Gar are in the background and are in focus.  Mag is in the foreground and is out of focus.  I like that my eye is drawn to Mag because he is in bright colors and in the foreground.  Then the older boys are more subtle in their dark colors but yet they are in focus.  So my eye stays with them trying to figure out what they are doing.  Personally, I think it’s a pretty cool shot.  

I used my 50mm lens with a wide aperture of f/2.0 to achieve this effect.  The wide aperture is the reason I was able to get the out of focus section in the photo.  

When you have a narrow aperture it kind of works like squinting your eyes to get things to appear more clearly.  So the opposite is what occurs when you have a wide aperture (Remember low number = wide aperture).  When you use a wide aperture you can focus on areas of your photo and have the rest be out of focus.  It’s a fun benefit of using a lens with a wide aperture.

This photo is fun too.  I caught Uly jumping off the top of the hill into the snow.  I love that if you look closely you can see the snow coming off of his boots and his is clearly caught in mid jump.  

This action was caught by using a very fast shutter.  My shutter was at 1/500 second.  Fast enough to catch snow falling off his boots and freeze his hands and body in mid air.  My aperture was quite a bit more narrow than the above photo at f/7.1 so you can see that there isn’t any blurred areas.

I think the composition is kind of fun.  It would probably be a bit better without the tree or the stuff in the bottom left hand corner but it’s not a snowboard magazine cover or anything like that.  I could crop it to just include that small section with Uly jumping but I personally like the top of the hill in the shot.  It’s a great shot showing Uly having a blast in the snow.

So all my boys had a blast in the snow and I had a blast playing with my camera settings.  It was a fun time followed up by delicious hot chocolate!