Capturing the Kiss on the Beach

The Kiss

While I was taking my break at work yesterday I sat on a park bench near to the beach so that I could take pictures of people as they went past. I had my Sony NEX-6 camera with me and expecting to get better photographs than I had done with the Samsung Galaxy S3 camera phone on the day previous. I only had the kit lens with me on my Sony which goes from 18 mm to 50 mm and so I could have been sitting a little closer to my subject matter. Unfortunately, I was unable to move the park bench. Anyway I did have a little bit of zooming available with the lens and I had and I said it to the longer part of the zoom available. I still ended up with a lot of foreground in pictures as you will see I didn’t with a lot of foreground and the picture.

Going for the prime

If I hadn’t been having a good break from work or perhaps will be more inclined to get up onto my feet and to change the point of view and composition that way. Or maybe would have been better for me to be using the new adapter I have with the Canon mount super zoom lens that I bought last year. The new adapter that I have does give me control over the aperture which is good and it does also do the autofocus. The problem is that the autofocus is dreadfully slow and it is unusable for quick capture, people moving type of scenes.

I do have the 16mm prime lens which is very good for street photography and I like using. It wasn’t going to be suitable for the photography is going to be able to do on this day. As we all know it is the glass that is important with your photography equipment and so I will keep on the lookout for good quality lenses that I can add to my camera bag. I can see that I will be staying with Sony for some time so spending some money on lenses is not really a problem. The only thing is that if I move to a full frame camera like the Sony a 7, that uses different lenses although it is possible to use the SEL lenses on it.

Here is the image before I did anything with it.

Kissing One 00283

Here are a couple of versions of the image at I make some adjustments. I applied some filters using Intensify Pro and then I did some cropping in Aperture on my Mac. I had rather a lot of sand in the foreground which was uninteresting so that had to be cropped out and in the end it gave me a photo that was almost a panorama view of the scene.

Changing the emphasis and the story

In this version of the image I follow the suggestions of my wife to crop in much closer and we found that it gave us a different story. The couple are still kissing in front of the beach and a blue sky that the emphasis is more upon them than it is of the playground and the rest of the beach.