Birthday Party Shooting

Posted by photonovice on January 14th, 2008

Alma es BalintMy sons were invited to a birthday party the other day. Due to the children’s age the parents were invited too. We had a great time surrounded by mainly 3-6 year old little ones running around us all the time. I took my photo gear with me and tried to capture the lovely faces. (Click on the image for the slideshow of the images.)
I share below the challenges I experienced photographing children during the party.

You could guess, I had to focus on fast moving subjects: I used the continuous auto-focusing mode for this to be able to keep focusing on my little subjects.
I was working with my 70-200 lens trying to jump away from the way of running boys’n'girls when I saw them appearing too close to the huge tube. :-)   The lens was working very well: auto-focus was fast and the images are very sharp even the ones made at wide open aperture setting.
Originally I was planning to place two SB-800 speedlights on bookshelves or tripods cross-lighting the scene but the space looked too big for that and the circumstances were a bit too risky to leave the lights unattended, so finally I used only one of them attached to the camera, having the diffuser dome on it and pointing half-way to the ceiling. Hence there are some, but not terribly strong shadows under the chins.
I used Soundslides for creating the slideshow. I think it is a great piece of software, it is extremely easy to use and does exactly what it should, so I decided to buy it. This way the demo sign doesn’t appear any more at the beginning of  the show.
I bought the music on Flashden from Steve McEnzie, a musician who calls himself adfish on the site.

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