My New Favorite Photos!

It was a last minute thing on Sunday, when my daughter-in-law asked if I would take family portraits of her, my son and my granddaughter. It was late in the morning and the light was not great, so we headed to the one park I know that stays in decent shade for most of the day. I always try to photograph portraits in the shade so that there is no harsh light on my subjects. 

I also try to place my subjects in front of a darker background so that they "pop out" more. The light behind them was a little brighter than I prefer, but not bad. My granddaughter does not love being photographed, but in front of grandpa she does pretty well. I think that smile says it all.

I love capturing family portraits (or any portraits for that matter), but these were extra special. I was using the Canon R3 with the Canon RF 70-200mm lens for all the photos. I also used the Canon 600 EX-RT flash turned down to -1 to add just a little catch light in the eyes and light them slightly. For these portraits I set the aperture to f/4.5. I did this because I wanted to make sure to have all three of them in focus.

We tried different locations in the park, to get a variety of images. Really...we went anywhere we could find good light. Both Connor and Emma are excellent photographers and videographers themselves (running their own business now), so they know good locations.

Two of my favorite young ladies in one photo.

As you can see, they are expecting their next child pretty soon, so this was a great chance to get those pregnancy photos before the big day.

Aurora was getting a little tired of being held, so they let her down and I took photos as mom and dad stood behind me and made funny gestures. Now that I only had one subject in front of my lens, I changed the aperture to f/2.8 to isolate my granddaughter and to let the background go totally out of focus.

I always love going through my images, and retouching favorites, but these were extra special. As I retouched them on my flight to Costa Rica, I was all smiles.

We had fun trying different poses. I know that these will be memories that will last forever. 

As I mentioned, we were looking for the shaded areas of the park. I knew that this location would be good, with shade and repetitive patterns of wood in the background. 

Then it was up to Connor, Emma and Aurora to do the rest. 

After taking these group photos, Aurora started running around on the platform. 

I got down low, turned off the flash, put the camera in high-speed burst mode, used the face tracking and fired off a bunch of photos as she ran towards mom and dad. 

Of all the images, these were definitely our favorites. 

And you can bet that at least one of these will be printed and framed in my house.  Maybe I will frame more than one in succession. I love the pure joy and happiness in her face.

If you saw my social media post yesterday, you saw that I got all new equipment from Apple. And as part of that, I finally made the switch from my Fitbit watch to the Apple Watch 9 (more on that to come in another blog post). I used some of the long flight to learn the new WatchOS, and loaded this photo as a watch face. Fun!

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