Group photo 1 baby and two adults. Messing up the settings, can someone help

[topcat07]

Hi,

Have taken a few photos this weekend of myself, my wife and our baby at the weekend outside with a tripod using the remote.

Camera Canon EOS M3 with efm 22mm.

I set the ISO to auto, 2.0 f stop, and shutter speed to 1/400 (baby moves a lot, was this fast enough?), set the focus to be on the middle person in the shoot which in this case was the baby being held.

Sometimes a face might not be that sharp in the photo.

I am wondering if should I have set the f stop to be higher such as f 4 or 5.6 to increase the depth of field? Wondering if when the faces became blurred the face was very slightly back from everyone else. I was trying to get a little blur on the background and let a lot of light in to get a fast shutter speed for the baby's movements to not blur. Or was it due to the old tech in the Canon do I needed a camera which could focus on multiple people's faces at once? I am going to be doing a lot of shots like this so would appreciate any tips on settings

 

[ancient_mariner]

Sounds to me like you needed a smaller aperture for greater depth of field, and to arrange the faces + baby in a flat plane so that focussing on one is focussing on all. If you want BG blur, where possible move the group further from the BG and closer to the camera.

FWIW if you need all faces to be dead-sharp then f5.6 and 1/200th would be what I'd choose. Also see if the camera can't do multiple shots on self timer - mine can be set to take up to 5 sequential images of a single scene from a single self-timer press.

 

[topcat07]

Sounds to me like you needed a smaller aperture for greater depth of field, and to arrange the faces + baby in a flat plane so that focussing on one is focussing on all. If you want BG blur, where possible move the group further from the BG and closer to the camera.

FWIW if you need all faces to be dead-sharp then f5.6 and 1/200th would be what I'd choose. Also see if the camera can't do multiple shots on self timer - mine can be set to take up to 5 sequential images of a single scene from a single self-timer press.

Thank you appreciate the help!

I will try and retake them with those settings. If the faces are out of line a little on f5.6 would I still get sharpness issues? Or should 5.6 allow me a good margin with alignment due to the greater depth of field?

Baby throws their arms around a lot is 1/200 quick enough to avoid their hands and arms becoming blurry?

 

[ancient_mariner]

5.6 should give a reasonable depth of field for a 22mm lens.

With portraits, having sharp eyes, then faces is the most important thing. Take lots of pictures of the same scene if the baby is moving because the you should get at least some where limbs aren't blurred.

 

[Garry Edwards]

It's a nice camera, very capable of producing good-quality images even at high ISO settings, but my question is this: Why did you set such a large aperture and a relatively slow shutter speed?

Your camera has an APS-C size CMOS sensor, which indicates that diffraction limitation (a general loss of overall sharpness) is likely to start to rear its ugly head at apertures smaller than f/11, which means that it will be OK at f/11 and should also be acceptable at f/16. You may have wanted to blur the background, but shooting at f/2 is just asking for trouble.

The same goes for your choice of shutter speed, 1/400th. that should have been fast enough for normal baby movement but 1/1000th or even 1/2000th would make sure of it.

I also question your focal length of 22mm. Perspective proportion is entirely dependent on camera position and lens-to-subject distance, not the lens's focal length, but the two go together in the sense that wide-angle lenses tend to be used much closer, creating unwanted distortion. As long as there is enough room, a 50mm lens on your camera would have suited the job much better. And if there wasn't enough room for a greater shooting distance, maybe you could have found a more suitable shooting space?

Just things to think about in the future.