Sic transit gloria mundi

Thus passes worldly glory… we are here for a limited time. Hence, make the most of it while you can. And especially, make photos. Or better, have them made, by someone who does it for a living.

This kid’s mom is a very good photographer, and I shot her boy with her yesterday:

(As usual, I used an off camera flash, and the speed was the usual “outdoors starting point” of 1/250 sec at 100 ISO; the aperture needed to match this was f/4.5, which also gave me the blurred background I wanted.)

I often hear “photography is dead”, “from here on, we are all just doing iPhone snapshots”, and so on. But looking at these, do you believe that?

I am sure that there will always be a market for great photos, photos that this young man will treasure when he is my age. An iPhone cannot give you blurred backgrounds, sharp images, lens choices, or the use of flash.

For this image we want a dark background to get saturated colour. That is the 1/250 sec at 100 ISO and f/4.5.

Then for the subject we want a flash: after all, “bright pixels are sharp pixels”.

To be bright enough, the flash was set to half power shooting through an umbrella, so:

A single speedlight is enough in this kind of light. If we had been in the bright sun, the speedlight would have to be very close and/or unmodified.

In any case: please have images like this made, or learn how to make them. After all, you can never travel back in time to do it over again.

Tomorrow, a special technique you can use when you have to shoot a subject in the bright sun.

5 thoughts on “Sic transit gloria mundi

  1. Awesome shot Michael! Where did you take this photo? I would like to visit this location. Thank you!

    Marino

Leave a Reply to Marino Aloysius Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *