When the stars align and magic happens! The right time of night. Paired with the perfect placement of the sprinkler. Add in a willing preschooler. And you get a fun series of photos to remember his carefree nature, his desire to get messy and his never-ending energy!
And he was wearing red so it fits the prompt! haha
A note about my settings and setup (shot in manual mode).
I wanted to stay a safe distance from the sprinkler so I used my Canon 70-200mm f/2.8. This lens also creates beautiful blur, compression and bokeh so I knew it would be perfect to create the image I had in my head! This was shot at a focal length of 148mm.
It was golden hour (the hour before sunset) so the light was falling behind the houses, trees, etc so I had the ISO set at 400. Still plenty low enough to avoid lots of grain/noise but sensitive enough to get the most light to the sensor.
I wanted a lot of the background blurred out but I also wanted both Landon and a lot of the water droplets in focus so I set the aperture to f/3.2. I tried to keep the focal point on Landon while he was running around but it was sometime hard to grab correct focus because of his movement, the water and the sun rays.
Because hew as running around I needed a fast shutter speed and set it at 1/500 for most of the time.
I positioned myself so the sun was coming in the corner of the frame and not directly coming into my lens. If I would have had the sun directly behind the sprinkler there would have been too much haze and sunflare and that's not the type of photo I wanted this time.