A different view of a Bar Mitzvah

Last weekend I photographed Alexander's Bar Mitzvah in Los Altos, CA. During the two hour service, along with the standard shots which I always get, I looked around for something a little different. It is my goal at every event to shoot unique images that help "define" that day. 

As always, I was in the back of the Temple shooting, since this is the only place where I am allowed to photograph. I saw this gentleman stand up in front of me and thought that his kippah (hat) was really cool looking. I changed my aperture so that I would get the background in just enough focus to see the people at the front of the Temple, but made sure to focus on the back of the man's head. I like this shot because it is a different view of the service.

And here is another shot where I purposely focused the camera on the grandfather in the front row, while showing a hint of his grandson in front of him.

And to do something totally different, I focused my 400mm lens just at the feet of the parents, while they were up at the front of the Temple. I like the image because it focuses the attention on the details, the shoes, the pants and the hanging tallit.

This is one of the "standard shots" but one of my favorites from the day. This is a shot of Alexander getting a big hug from his grandmother. I like the fact that you can see the big smile on his face.

If you have been reading my blog for a while, you will know that I like to roll the zoom while doing night shots, but I have never really tried this effect in the daytime. In the same spirit of trying something completely different, I changed the ISO from 3200 to 100 and set the aperture to f22 hoping to get a long exposure. This gave me a 1.5 second exposure to work with. I like this shot because it shows Alexander twice; one image within the other.

Towards the end of the service, the rabbi asked everyone to get together to sing a song, and all these kids formed this perfect connection. I have photographed plenty of Mitzvahs, but I have never seen this before. I think that it really shows the closeness of these friends.