The Best of a Sequence

Its important to realise that at the time of shooting, what you thought worked might come back and look awful and yet shots you thought were terrible can actually be rescued and are sometimes even better than you first thought.

Taking a sequence of shots helps to unfold ideas as the more you progress with the shots, the further your ideas can go. As you can see in this series of photos the ideas grew between different poses, and the subjects became more relaxed and willing to try different things with each other as a group.

As I was taking the photos, the ones that I originally thought worked well were the very first ones, and the ones of all four of them sitting on the floor.

This is still true for the first three images, although I was at the time most keen on the very first one, yet when I reviewed them it was actually the 3rd image which seemed to have the best composition; there faces were less squashed into each others bodies and the fact you can see the hands clasped at the front between the mum and daughter link them all in nicely.

I liked this image while I was shooting and still do, but after examining it on the monitor have realised that some of the shadows on the faces are a little too dark and I could have adjust there positioning slightly better at the time to eliminate them.

This was one of the images that at the time of taking the photo I thought looked really naff! I had been to a personal photo shoot a few years ago and to get us all laughing together they had asked us to start a tickle fight and I thought I might try the idea and see what happened. Initially I thought the fact one subject was not facing the camera and one was pulling away had ruined the image, but when I viewed it again later the slight bit of action actually made the family appear like they really were having fun, rather than a very static image of them all smiling. It changes there expressions slightly too and it becomes a much more pronounced smile breaking into a laugh, which feels more believable.

At the time I thought the above two images had gone really well and the composition looked interesting, unfortunately the second one is too crowded and the 2 subjects furthest away are almost lost in the background, and to top it off my aperture was set far too wide to capture the very back subject clearly enough. I had set it to a small aperture to let enough light in as the even though I was using a flash head and softbox, and there was also the addition of a large window to the left of the shot, it was still a little dark at times. It was nice to experiment though, I think possibley with some more thought he pose could work well with other people in a slightly different setting with more space and a different vantage point.

So you can see that with a sequence, sometimes it helps to take all the shots home, even the ones you thought were not good enough as after you have reviewed them there may be some that have elements you had not seen to begin with. If I had deleted everything I thought at the time was not particularly brilliant, I may have been left with not many good shots at all!