At the playground with Ollie & the Weisenbergs

Ollie and I had the good fortune today to have my old friend Bruce Weisenberg and his lovely wife, Jiang Yan, stop by to spend a couple of hours with us. It had been a good solid seven years since I last saw Bruce, and I had yet to meet his wife. They, of course, had not yet met Oliver, so it was a wonderful opportunity to catch-up with one another in a context that is certainly a ubiquitous one in my life these days: the local playground.

Oliver has always been a social butterfly, but he seemed particularly enamored of Bruce and Jiang Yan, leading them around the playground from swing to slide as if he'd known them his whole life. If Bruce thought it odd seeing me interact with a two-and-a-half year-old (after years of knowing me as...well...someone not likely to be interacting with a two-and-a-half year-old), it was equally amusing - jarring, even - for me to see Bruce pushing Oliver around in a little toy car, looking every bit the bemused dad.

Old friends, new friends, times changing, people's lives evolving ... at the end of the day (and at the risk of over-the-top, cloying sentimentality), aren't these really  the moments that make life worth living?

 

Click on any of the above photos to view a larger image. Additional photos from this session are in my galleries beginning here.

Ollie eats his peas...

...like a good boy should.

                                    Oops! One got away!

The Magic Hour

Or, the Magic Hour-and-a-half, depending on who you ask. Some claim it's the hour after sunrise and before sunset plus the half-hour before sunrise and after sunset. Others say its simply the first and last hours of daily sunlight. Either way, the Magic Hour (also known as the Golden Hour) is the time of day when the sun is low in the sky and offers a direct, warm, golden glow while also providing dramatic shadows and contrast. Some photographers only take out their cameras during that time.

 

Getting the exposure right can be surprisingly tricky during the magic hour, especially when photographing people (and definitely when the subject is running around and moving in and out of the light, as is our little friend in these examples). For landscapes, matrix-metering would give you generally good results, but in this situation I tend to use center-weighted, and occasionally even spot-meteing (usually to keep the highlights in Ollie's golden locks from blowing-out).

Back-lighting can be particularly effective during the magic hour, as in the final photo above, provided you nail the exposure. In this case I used center-weighted metering and didn't worry about the back-lit highlights in Oliver's hair blowing out, because that is the desired effect, after all. Fortunately, center-weighted metering gives a modicum of attention to the areas outside of the center of the scene, so there is still enough detail in the highlights to make this a well-balanced image.