CONTRAST-

This is a picture I took of some of our friends son when we were in Nashville visiting them a few weeks ago. My wife had been talking up my skills, and of course I agreed, so I figgured that I better try to get some decent shots for them of their son. I was following him around, and being a normal 2 1/2 yr old, he refused to look at me or even face my way for the camera; every time I tried to shoot, all I could see was his back, that is until he went into this "crawl tube". I really only had about 5 seconds to get this shot before he went on to something else, so here are a few tips on what to look for on this kind of shot; specifically the contrast. What is contrast? Contrast is the extreme difference from a lighted area to a dark area. Possibly even from light to dark, such as a white wedding dress and a black suit but we are going to focus on the lighting issue....our eyes are amazing as they just naturally adjust to the diffences in harsh lighting contrast places, but film (and digital) picutures do not. This picture for example, has harsh contrast as there is a very limited amount of light in the tube that the boy was playing in, but there was natural sunlight in the background (it was actually a cloudy day, I can only imagine how bad it would have been if it was sunny). The main idea is to make sure you can recognize/predict the contrast, so that you can "create" your image purposefully, such as seen here. The most common mistake made with point and shoot cameras is that the camera exposes the background or another object instead of the face/primary focus of the shot. I made sure that the camera exposed the boy properly, as opposed to the background where he would have become a silloette (which is another option) and the result is pleasing to the eye, even though the background is completely washed out, actually helping to create a focus on the boy. On your point and shoot, you may have a couple of opstions for exposure, the most common being that you can set your shutter speed to how fast or slow you want it......that will be a later topic. Well have fun with contrast, and let me see some of your pics!