Smile! It's almost Spring...I think. I didn't realize that I put this week's prompt of "smile" right after last week's "laughter" prompt. Oh well. It's never a bad thing to have such happy images of my kids, right? I wanted to feature Bryce this week and he was a willing model for me...for a few seconds anyway. I have seen this trend in a lot of photography communities I am in of shooting under a blanket and I wanted to try it out. I choose a white blanket so as much light as possible would filter through and I used the blue stripes as a leading line by making sure to align them correctly. When Bryce usually smiles for a picture he gets a huge cheesy grin on his face so this time I asked him to look to the side and give just a small smile. I love the light in his eyes - and where did he get such amazing lashes?! My sweet boy is growing up and I love watching it every day.
A note about my settings and setup (shot in manual mode).
Again I used the 35mm lens because I had to be really close to him so we could both be under the blanket. I wanted to fill the frame with his face so it worked out perfectly.
I needed to let in a lot of light so that his face wouldn't be too dark so I upped the ISO to 2500.
I positioned him facing the windows and opened all the blinds to let in as much light as possible as well.
Even though this lens can go down to 1.4 I wanted to keep it a bit higher so the focus would be super sharp so I choose 3.5 and made sure to place the focal point on his eye. If you aren't using back button focusing and have trouble getting your photos sharp, you should definitely check it out.
I wasn't too concerned about the shutter speed since he wasn't moving but I kept it at 1/200 which is about as slow as I like to go with kids.
I couldn't decide how I wanted to edit this photo so I included both color and black & white. Which do you like better? Leave a comment to let me know.
If you would like to join me this year and complete your own Project 52, download my prompt guide and follow along.