For this image I asked the brother and sister to go lay or sit in the grass under the shade of the few bushes next to the lake. Since the shoot was already about 90 minutes old, the sun had risen to the point where there seemed so little shade anywhere at this park. Once I had fine tuned their location by telling them to “move a little that way, and a little this way”, I was ready to let them just be there without my interruption. I used an 85mm lens, so I was far enough away that they could forget about me. And they actually did start talking and losing track of the fact that we were in the middle of a photo session. So good when that happens.
I waited a lot (minutes at a time, which seems longer when it’s hot and your shirt is already soaked with effort) for moments when each of their expressions and body language seemed to complement the other. At first their postures were a little stiff, but after a few minutes they both began to find their own comfortable positions.
There is often a fine line between looking bored and looking thoughtful, so I tried not to shoot many frames when their mouths had no shape, and shot when they instead seemed to form some meaning… at least to me. I didn’t mind if their eyes met, or if they laughed, etc., as long as one expression fit the other, and I think that happens here.
Technically, besides making sure I very slightly under-exposed for the skin in shade, my main concern shooting a longish lens at a shallow aperture was to move about so that the two faces were in the same plane of focus. This allowed my shallow depth of field to render both of them sharp. Just in case I was off a little, I focused on the girl, since she seemed ever so slightly closer to me, and it’s always better to focus on the closer subject, since depth of field extends mostly away from the camera.
Tech info: Handheld Fuji S2, 85mm f1.8 lens, set to f2.4, at 1/1000th sec., ISO 100, B/W Mode, Fine JPEG, Org Tone, Standard Sharp, AWB, Manual exposure mode. In-camera meter reading taken off the skin in shade, then fine tuned after a test shot.
–Eddie.