Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Having Fun (and Shooting) In The Snow

The family made our annual December trip to Mammoth Lakes, CA to go skiing, sledding and just relax. And, of course, I always look forward to capturing images in the snow. This is the only time of the year when I can easily get good images of our big black dog, Bailey. The snow acts like a giant light reflector and helps me light that cute face of his. And this time, like before, Bailey was joined by his "cousin dog" Ike for some canine fun.

A shot of Ike running at me. This was captured at 1/800th of a second to freeze the action. With all that light, I was able to grab this at ISO 100 at f5.6. I like the shot of Ike but I also like the reflections from the trees in the background giving more dimension to the snow.

Here is Bailey looking very regal. He did me a favor by stopping in his tracks by the brush (and leaving some nice clean snow in the background. Thanks Bailey boy!

Nonstop fun for the dogs which also meant nonstop shooting for me. I metered these shots at +0.3 to get a little more light on the dogs (since the cameras still get fooled by that white snow).

I love this shot because it shows my son being a good big brother and helping his sister get launched. I focused on my daughter but kept the aperture at f6.3 so that my son would be just slightly out of focus. The attention is drawn to Ali but you still see Connor helping out.

This is my nephew, Shane, being a crazy kid. He is absolutely fearless and was going off the jump and facing me to get a cool picture for his room. He was wearing a green jacket which was blending into the background, so being the bad uncle (but good photographer), I asked him to take off his jacket and gloves) so that his red shirt would stand out in the picture.

The snow is a great place to take group shots too!


I love capturing kids being kids. The trick to getting these pictures is to keep your shutter speed at least 1/200 sec (at the very minimum) and have your focus mode in Servo focus (as Canon calls it). This means that as you burst images and the subject is coming closer to you, the focus is changing with each shot.

No comments: