Sisterly love
Sometimes, capturing a moment is far easier than you ever expected. Use what you have and let your subjects dictate their actions. My girls placed their wood, kid-sized, white chairs up against a painted blue wall in my entry foyer. Above them were jackets, bags and such hanging from a coat rack. Between the chairs was a nightlight, flickering as if it were agitated due to the constant change in light as the girls got up and down and up and down. They were playing together, just as they always do.
In this instance, I recognized a photo opportunity; grabbed the camera and my Sigma 18-125 mm because I knew I only had about 8 feet of space between the wall, my girls and another wall against which I would have to position myself. I quickly removed the jackets and the annoying nightlight and pushed the chairs together as close as they could go.
The girls immediately jumped back onto them, swung their legs to the side, turned around, and continued to play. I watched them as they were doing this, wondering how in the world would I be able to get a good shot out of this. I had no studio lights, only daylight coming in from two tall, skinny windows on either side of the front door and a very weak foyer light above. No 18% gray card at my quick disposal either to set a custom white balance. In this case, it was almost literally point and shoot.
Knowing I’d need as much light as possible in this dimly lit area, I popped up my on-board flash and set my exposure compensation to +1. My shutter speed was too slow (only 1/25 at this point) but I figured I’d see what I could get. I said “Emily…. give Abby a hug.” and in that split second, she did, I snapped and a winning photo was born.
Amazingly, there wasn’t much shadowing to this photo. I reset my white point to a point on the white chair and cloned out some of the stray shadows in the left portion of the photo. In looking more closely at the photo, I thought it would be great, except the remnants of breakfast were still visible on their shirts and made the photo look dirty to me (typical of my kids, but unclean none-the-less). So I cloned those out. I dodged their eyes, ever so slightly and cropped so that the seat of the chair acted as the horizon point for the photo.
And when I looked at it again, I couldn’t believe my luck. A moment of sisterly love caught forever.