Here is a fun photo exercise idea for the weekend – a Playing in the Leaves Photo Recipe! The gold and red leaves won’t be here much longer. When the sun breaks this weekend, grab your camera, make a pile of leaves and let the kids go for it!
I love to involve the kids with photo shoots. So I had these two to build me the BIGGEST pile of leaves. I told them to grab two handfuls and on the count of 3, throw the leaves in the air as high as they can. But kids will do exactly what you tell them and sometimes nothing more or less. So that just means they need even more photocoaching. So then I told these two to keep their arms stretched high to the sky and smile as the leaves fall down all around them (and I demonstrated what I meant with exaggeration). We practiced a couple times (I shot each run through–just in case). When the three of us knew we were all on the same page, we yelled our countdown “ONE, TWO, THREE! THROW THE LEAVES!”
For all my Photo Recipe Lovers, a Leaves Photo Recipe: Aperture (F/stop) was a 2.8 to give me a blurry background. ISO was down to 200 for maximum color saturation. With all that sunlight, the Shutter Speed was cooking at 640th of a second or 1/640–plenty fast to freeze their action and smiles.
Love you all!
Me Ra
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I love how you photo coached your children. I forget to coach mine, and sometimes it can be frustrating. I have to start showing them what I want them to do just like you did, good idea!
it seems like in this picture that they would have been backlit. what did your meter look like? centered on the 0 or closer to +1 or did you bring exposure up in lightroom?
Great question Lora. This was a Fall Shoot that I did for close friends. We started late so the sun was higher then I wanted it to be. So I did decide to backlight them and metered on the little boy’s face. Kept my meter in between 0-1. And the color is pretty much out of the camera, the Sony 900 color is that good. Not exposure or brightness really added either. But I did up the contrast a bit to bring more definition to the sharpness of the leaves. And I also added a vignette too.
Hope that helps!
beautiful fall colors! Appreciate the coaching tip for the little ones. Your right, it really does help to photocoach them with all the details especially when there are so many distractions around!
thank you Me Ra! At first glance I thought it was your kids! 🙂 It’s such a fun colorful shot, thanks for the help!
wow….i totally followed lora’s question and your answer….boy i’m getting good. 🙂
I love, love, love your photo recipe posts! Thank you!