Little Boy Train Photoshoot
Little boys love trains. We were contracted to do a “Thomas the Tank Engine” 4th birthday photoshoot for Jude. I’ll admit I felt pretty intimidated trying to imagine how I was going to pull off a themed “Thomas” photoshoot without it being super cheesy. I consider myself pretty lucky because the city we live in has a miniature train in our largest park. Not only does my city have one, I’m a pretty smooth operator and I snagged an exclusive session with said miniature train. It was raining for part of our time and the shed was really, really dark. This makes things a bit difficult for taking really good photos, but let me give you a little run down of how we did it.
Being that it was so dark we had to shoot at a high ISO (in order to get the shutter speed fast enough). We were lucky that the train was facing where the sun was outside the shed so we were able to use some natural light coming in. There were tungsten lights on the roof of the shed which is where the ‘warm’ light is coming from (we have a post coming soon about white balance).
We didn’t want Jude moving around too much because of several factors; one being the fire in the train and secondly, our shutter speed had to be slow because it was so dark and we didn’t want blurry pictures. We tried to get as much variance as we could without moving too much (it was awkward trying to shoot into the train). We adjusted our exposure compensation for the darkness of the background and the lightness on Jude’s face.
After letting Jude see the inside of the train, we got him to stand on the front of the train and holler “ALL ABOARD!” We try to let kids just be themselves when we shoot, as much as we can. The pictures just seem to turn out better that way. I do guide them a little though (aka: “Do this for a skittle”)
Little boys (and girls too) just have a hard time doing any one thing for very long. So we wandered out of the train shed and told Jude he could show his “Thomas” the big train. He played with his toy for only a moment and he wanted something new again. The gentleman showing us the train introduced him to the track switch. We asked Jude if he could try and flip the switch (for another Skittle of course!)
After not too long with that, we had to move along to something else. We gave Jude a train whistle and got him to walk along the tracks to the adjacent park to conclude our photoshoot.
To find out exactly how we shot Jude at the train station and what our camera settings were, you can get on the waitlist for our DSLR Photography Course. One of the bonuses for the course is a full walkthrough of how we did the shoot!
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