A Prime Christmas Morning

 Back in the day, when you bought a 35mm single lens reflex (SLR) camera, you not only got the camera body, you got what was called a "normal" lens. It was a 50mm lens with a nice wide open aperture - f1.8 down to f1.2. No zoom lens this. If you needed to get closer to your subject, you had to move your feet. The nice thing about the 50mm lens is that it is great to shoot in low light conditions (because of the wide aperture), and the magnification of the 50mm lens just about matches that of your eyes. So the scene looks very natural. 

This past Christmas my wife, Lesley, and I were out visiting our daughter and her family in Somerset County, PA. Our two grandsons are 6 and 4 and still very much into Christmas and Santa Claus. I wanted to photograph the inevitable early morning attack on the presents under the tree. However, I wanted a natural look and did not want to use a flash. It would be too distracting and the results would have been ordinary at best. So, my plan was to use my 50mm f1.4 lens and shoot with available light; room lights and some light coming in from the windows. 

I set my D700 to ISO 2500 and the white balance to tungsten and tested the settings. I was shooting at f1.4 at about 1/125 of a second shutter speed. All seemed well. I put the camera on continuous shooting mode and continuous focus in order to catch the focus point. It would be a very narrow depth of field. All I had to do was to follow the kids around as they tore off wrapping paper and opened boxes full of toys. I knew that the results would be in color AND B&W since I wanted to have some shots that were evocative of Christmases back in the '50s when I was a kid. 

I had to make some adjustments along the way to aperture settings and had to really concentrate on my focus points. But all went well and the results were great.