Bonus - "How can I make my sledding pics look better?"

You want to know what happened.

Here’s the story. Took the boy to the local sledding grounds a few years back and brought along the camera for a day of laughs and fun. Click. He’s at the top of the hill. Click. He’s coming down the hill. Click. He’s in mid a…oh boy, he landed on his head. The bad news – a headache for Cabot and heart failure for dad. Good news – I had a good camera strap around my neck, so that when I instinctively dropped the camera to attend to the boy, it didn’t shatter in the snow.

Taking pics of whooshing toboggans can be a whole lot of fun, but there are a few real tricks to getting it juuuuuust right. Get out in the winter wonderland this weekend (if you’re on the east coast) and try these on for size…

Get the snow white.

Your camera has a habit of trying to make tones look nice and even. That means it’s going to make your shots danger to compensate for the blinding white snow. Everything will come out gray. Still shooting on P? Good for you. Get out the manual and figure out how to overexpose your picture so that everything looks nice and bright.

Pick a faster shutter speed.

I don’t recommend this one often, but until we get to the post on shutter speeds, I’m going to recommend searching out the “sports” setting on your camera. That will allow you to freeze the actio.

Go for the emotion.

We talked about getting close the other day – and this is a great chance to try out what you learned. Zoom in on faces and body language to show how your kids are enjoying the day. Nothing like a little frost on the eyelashes and rosy cheeks to create a memory.

Get in the way.

Move around and try different perspectives. Top of the hill. Midway down. On the back of your own sled chasing the kids down the hill (be careful with your camera).

 

Next up: taming the boogeyman of photography.

Hey! We ran a contest last week for a 4 Gig EyeFi Card – and our winner is Lynda Sinclair (Lynda, drop me a line here or on Twitter). Congratulations to everyone who entered. Stay tuned for our next contest - I’m going to give away an honest to goodness camera!