Those intent eyes filled with determination to catch the ball...We didn't think Landon would be our athlete but he's proving he's got skills and he definitely has the fight to stick with it until he masters something.
And he's just too darn cute and blessed with gorgeous eyelashes.
A note about my settings and setup (shot in manual mode).
The evening light in our backyard is pretty awesome the way to streams through the trees and through the houses. I wanted to highlight that light by creating pretty bokeh while maining drawing attention to my subject. That is why I choose the 70-200mm lens - the creaminess it creates is so pretty and it also allows me to stay out of the action and be an observer.
The sun was setting to the light was fading fast so I had to increase my ISO a bit to 400 since it wasn't super sunny. Remember, the less light available the more "worker bees" you need to send to collect the light so increase the number.
Notice the catchlights in his eyes. That's because he is facing towards the direction of the sun. If he would have been turned the other way his eyes would be dark. I did not position him in this direction but it just happens that how they were set up to play catch was perfect!
The boys were moving around a lot during this time so I sped up the shutter speed enough to freeze their motion while also allowing in enough light to the sensor. Remember, a shutter speed over 1/200 is usually good enough to freeze simple motion.
Though the aperture isn't as low as it could be (2.8 is the minimum for this lens), there is still a lot of compression and bokeh. That is becuase of the distance between myself and Landon as well as Landon and the fence. You can see that his closest eye and ear are in focus because they are on the same plane but the focus quickly falls off and his other eye is pretty blurry.
The composition prompt this week was FILL THE FRAME. I was intention as I was shooting to get different angles, perspectives, etc and I usually forget about the close up so this prompt came at a good time because it was on my mind.
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