A photo shoot with my grandsons
I knew the grand kids were spending Saturday night with us (all except Destiny who is feeling well), so I spent the day planning out a picture I wanted to take of Dalton and Brylan in my studio. I had a great pose in mind, one I thought would be easy for them to pull off together, and in my minds eye I could see it being a wonderful portrait of them, showing the wonderful brotherly love that they share with each other.
I had my light and background all set up by the time they arrived and I had already spent some time making sure my exposure was correct. Everything was well planned out, I thought.
But I forgot that boy will be boys and after I had them in my studio only a couple of minutes I realized that my vision of the perfect portrait was not to be.
Dalton understood my posing instructions fairly well, although he insisted on ad libbing the first few times I tried to adjust his position or posture, and his smile was purposely forced and exaggerated, but I could live with that because I felt I could control it long enough to get just one good picture.
Brylan, on the other hand, seemed not to understand my instructions at all, and in fact would do just the opposite of what I said to him. If I asked him to turn his head and not his shoulders he moved his shoulders and not his head. When I said be happy and smile he scowled. If I told him to look at the camera he would look at Dalton.
It wasn’t long before I broke into a sweat. Finally, I gave up on my originally planned pose, deciding to just take the picture “Au Natural”, letting them just be boys, taking whatever I could get.
I still tried giving them advice and suggestions, of course, and sometimes they actually seemed to be trying to help me out, but mostly they did there own thing, causing me to be quick on the shutter release button. Luckily I’d decided to hand hold my camera and do away with my tripod for this session. It’s a good thing, too, because the action was fast. It was hard to keep them in my viewfinder even without a having the camera tethered to a tripod.
Brylan quickly became tired of the whole deal after only a few shots, I found myself promising him impossible things if only he’d let me take a few more pictures. That worked a couple of times but I finally realized our photo shoot was over and told him he could go back into the house and let grandma take off his new shirt before he got it dirty.
Well, he didn’t want to go back into the house & actually seemed hurt that grandpa was trying to get rid of him. so, I told him he could stay and asked if he wanted me to take another picture of him.
A big smile and a nodding head got him back under the lights and in front of the camera. That’s when I got the best picture, the one below.
It seemed to me that the simple photo shoot I’d planned took much longer than I’d expected and to tell the truth I was sweating profusely when we finally called it a wrap.
Actual real time? Probably15 or twenty minutes, and I’d only taken 17 photographs, many of which were severely underexposed because the action was happening so rapidly that my flash didn’t have enough time to re-cycle between shots.
I finally sent the boys back into the house to change their clothes then wiped the sweat from my face with a towel.
Whew! That was actually a lot of work!
I never did even come close to getting the shot I’d been planning all day long, either. Maybe another time.
And maybe not.
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This photo of Brylan (left) and Dalton, taken in my studio yesterday afternoon, made my efforts worthwhile. The boys were a lot of fun to work with even though their rambunctiousness made grandpa sweat a great deal during the photo session. But their smiles are contagious aren’t they? We’ll do it again someday.
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