With traveling over Christmas I missed lat month’s Storyteller’s blog circle, but am excited to get back into and break down this image for you! If you’ve missed past months you can check them out here and then keep clicking through to learn from some pretty awesome storytellers from around the world.

Camera: Fuji X100t, which is a mirrorless fixed 23 mm crop sensor

Settings: ISO 200, 23mm, f/4.0, 1/125

For the last few weeks of December, my family and I adventured in Maui. Given that we were travelling with a 2 and 5 year old, our days pretty much consisted of waking up, eating breakfast and then heading to the beach until lunch and nap time. There is really no place that the kids can entertain themselves better than the beach! But, the downside (at least in my opinion) is the copious amounts of sand. It ends up everywhere and I even found some in my bed at home after I’d emptied the suitcases! I wanted to capture the sand that was always stuck to her hands and how she still needs to hold a water bottle with 2 hands, often wrapping her whole mouth around the opening in an attempt to drink. These are the things I’ll forget in only a few years when she can easily open the bottle all on her own and hold it with one hand.

This photo was taken mid-day, in full sun. Our beach chairs were set in the shade and I snapped this when she came back into the shade for a drink. My ISO had been set to 200 as I’d been shooting the kids in the water just minutes before and hadn’t had time to change it, which resulted in my shutter speed being lower than I normally prefer, but given she wasn’t moving, it worked in this case. I wanted the focus to really be on her, so I shifted my body a bit to eliminate as many of the other beach chairs and people as possible from the frame. I chose to not get in too close in order to leave some space to show that she was in her swim suit and that there was beach behind her. I also shot at a slight angle upwards. I tend to shoot kids either right at their level or up at them slightly in order to make them look a bit bigger within the frame.

In post processing I converted to black and white to emphasize the grains of sand. Also, her bathing suit was really colourful and I found that in colour it was what caught my eye first instead of the sand, so black and white was the way to go in order to best tell the story.

Ready to see more pretty images and the stories behind the story? Click on through to visit Kelly Sutton from Horse & Feather Photography. I love seeing Kelly’s images pop up on my instagram feed as she has such a natural way of capturing her boys in their home, but with obvious thought and purpose.

Make sure to come back and visit next month for a new instalment in this series.

 

 

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