I’ve blogged about the difficulty faced when taking pictures of Hannah. When she’s interacting with us and isn’t in one of her grumbling moods, she’d coo delightfully, giggle and generally be cute. It’s easy to take pictures of her being happy when the both of us are around, but if I’m trying to capture her happy moods on my own, it’s a lot tougher.
I figured that Hannah seems extra alert when when there’s a large DSLR pointing in her general direction. Her reaction will then run the gamut of either fidgeting (which she normally does when she’s alone) to starring curiously directly into the front lens element.
So one trick I’ve learned when shooting alone is to hold the camera off-eye i.e. frame the shot with the viewfinder, hold the camera steady with one hand, set to continuous focusing, then look away and interact with Hannah and hope she doesn’t move too much out of the frame. Obviously this sort of thing would work best with a tripod since I was precariously balancing a 2.7 kg DSLR + lens + flash unit on one hand, but both the two ‘pods at home can take too long to deploy.
Still, the results have turned out satisfactorily, e.g. like the selection from several pictures taken quickly yesterday afternoon. They were taken with the D300 with myself off the viewfinder:
(Taken using the Sigma 18-250mm.)
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