The Simple Photograph

Continuing from the last post, looking at my images that I like which are simple in nature, I found this one. A quick snap of my wife in very poor light. The scene, as I saw it, had wonderful snow falling at a Christmas market in Salzburg. My family and I had just arrived and went out for a quick dinner. We were standing around a small table eating some sausage and pretzels while drinking mulled wine. 

The scene was incredible but the light was very low. While we could see just fine, our eyes are better than sensors at capturing light, I knew the images would be very dark. Instead of fighting it I tried taking some images of the family with their faces filling the frame. None of them were really working for me as they could have been taken anywhere.

I wanted to capture a bit of the scene around us. While we ate, I thought of this issue and then had an idea. I would drop the M9 ISO to 400 (I was trying much higher) and set the camera at a 1/45 sec shutter speed, open the aperture to f/2 (50mm lens as the 35 was too wide). My wife was looking at the market scene so I called to her and she looked back at me over her shoulder. I had already seen the umbrella coming towards us and the lights in the background.

Image captured. I like the simple  aspect of the image. My wife's face, dark all around and the Christmas lights with umbrella in the background.  

The image below I took a very different approach.  We were standing at a train station with little in the way of interesting things to look at. Low light again however I wanted to clearly see my sons face. I opted for a small, on camera flash, and shot him with the lens wide open. The blurred everything behind his front eye and made it easy to burn out the background. He was wearing a coat with a hood on which was very dark blue. This was easy to darken up in post.