Fionnuala started kindergarten today, and even though she’s been going to preschool for a couple of years, there’s no denying that her first day of real school is a landmark.
She’s been increasingly excited as the day approached, and was the first one down this morning, anxious not to be late.
I wanted to get a shot of her getting ready herself, to show both her growing independence and how little she still looks to us. That contrast between growing up and still being a so young seemed to be what today was about.
Wearing her new strawberry socks (held back for today) and sitting at the top of the stairs, this one gets close to what I was after.
I had the wrong lens on for this really (the 24-105mm f/4L). It’s pretty dark in the hall, so I had to push the ISO up and there’s still a little motion blur on her fingers. I also adjusted the exposure compensation down 1/3 of a stop – partly to get me a faster shutter speed, but mainly to show that it wasn’t bright in the hall (and play up some of that reflected light on the concrete from the bathroom window at the back). A ‘perfectly exposed’ shot here would have looked too bright to me, and I didn’t mind losing the shadow detail around her skort.
Hand-held at 1/10 sec is not recommended, but the image stabilization seems to have helped quite a bit. A fast lens (like one of the primes I normally use) would have been the better choice for a faster shutter speed, and blurred the background a little more, but we were just heading out the door. Sometimes you just have to get the shot with whatever you can.
Details: Canon 5D, AV mode, 1/10 sec, f/4.0, 47mm, ISO 1600, -1/3EV.
Aperture work: slight crop, noise reduction, manual white balance adjustment, vignette added, shadows and highlights tweaked.
