Lively Blanchards

One of my favorite families! Going back through some images I just had to give this one some attention. They were on time, ready to go and dressed for success on one of the last semi warm and sunny days of the year. I feel as though I really get a sense of each one of them in this particular image. Ok, for composition I just loved the way the sun was hitting the trees behind them and the grass as well. When i used to shoot I would always put the sun behind my subjects so as not to have to battle it for exposure. This works great still but there are some shortcomings. The main issue for me is the lack of background detail. If the light were directly behind the trees they would have lost all of their definition color and brightness. Granted, these types of portraits are about your subjects and not the background. It's still nice to have some depth, however. I photographed this portrait with the 70-200mm lens at 130mm, which also presents a few problems. You are so far away from your subjects and when photographing children, you almost always need to be right in their face to get their attention. Especially outdoors! My next issue is the length of the lens dictates my slowest handheld shutter speed(or so I thought). The new 70-200mm 2.8 IS L v2 is ridiculously sharp and the IS (image stabilization) is insane! This was shot at 1/40 at 130mm which is no easy feat! What's great is even at f9 there is enough depth of field to isolate the subjects with the helping hand of the sun adding just a touch of it's own glorious seperation! All in all a pretty sweet family portrait! Again I went after that cool painterly effect in post which I think turned out rather well. Thoughts, questions, concerns? Almost forgot....Lit with an Einstein Camera Left with Reflector camera right for fill. Hair light by none other than the sun! http://flic.kr/p/iWHrQk