It was an absolutely gorgeous day yesterday and quite a surprise for April. It was like a hot summer's day without a cloud in the sky. I took the opportunity to do some photography as we were visiting my Aunt in Sussex, it being my neice's 5th birthday and my cousin's 16th. Naturally the focus of the day was on the kids and I got chance to use my trusty Canon 350D SLR. I set the camera to black and white mode. Now I know I could do this in Photoshop but there is some satisfaction gained from shooting in B&W from the outset as you are really looking for movement and pattern over colour. It is also great when previewing as I am often inspired to take different shots to when I shoot in colour. It's not an obvious work flow for having a digital camera but one I find satisfying. You do have to be careful when doing this as no colour information is recorded and no way of turning a b&w image into a colour one. So taking photographs of kids....my advice: stick the camera on continuous shutter mode and fire away. You will need a big memory card but the results are worth it. Yes you are going to discard 95% of your images but you will capture that glint in the eye or that look of total amazement which you will never capture any other way. Get the kids busy as well. Have an activity. There is nothing worse than posed kids pictures. They are much more alive when playing and immersed in something. I also set my camera to manual focus for most of the day so that I could really keep the attention on what I wanted to whilst blurring background elements out. It is also really interesting to have the focus on something else and have the kids blurry as often they are bouncing about anyway. Check out my flickr photoset here.
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