Little Guy

So last week, I asked a friend if I could photograph her children while I visited, which she was very open to. I learned my first lesson in photographing children, which is that they are on their own schedule, because one of them had to go down for a nap. When I first pulled out my camera, my friend's son was laying on the couch. I wanted to take some shots without disturbing him just to see if I could get the exposure right with a faster shutter speed because kids are wiggly. I was also afraid if I started asking him to do anything, he may get unhappy and then I wouldn't have any shots. So here are the first photos I've taken of a child with my new fancy camera:

No blurred motion! And the lighting looks okay to me. I haven't learned much yet on changing/fixing skin tones and I didn't do anything to the white balance. I can't tell if the focus fell on his face or on the blanket right near his face. What do you think?
Luckily my friend then coaxed him down onto the floor in front of the couch to play with his train set, so I had my next set-up/scene. I raised my shutter speed because I assumed he'd be moving more. I also raised my ISO because he was further away from the window, and because raising the shutter speed lowered the light too. I got down on the floor and came up with:

Not really the rule of thirds and I chopped off his feet, but you can't beat that smile!

I think the focus fell on his right elbow. And I chopped off his left elbow and left knee. 

Full body!

I set the aperture low because it was one child and I wanted the background blurry. But I think because we were really close and the couch was right behind him, the depth of field I chose picked up more and less than I wanted it to.
He wanted to get back up on the couch so I took a couple more. They looked brighter than the previous couch ones and I guessed it was because I had left my ISO up and my shutter speed down, and I was right!

At this point, my friend took our her old camera which had a lens that fit my camera. So I popped it on and used the camera the same way I had been using it, because I have not even begun to learn about different lens'. The one thing I did notice was that I could fit more in the picture from the same distance. It also had a higher minimum aperture so more was in focus. He also jumped back down to the trains.

Back to my lens and I feebly tried to set up the couch with a blanket so as to have a plain background.

He wanted to sit on the other side of the couch. Haha!

What a cutie!

The top one had a higher ISO than the rest, so that's why it is much brighter. I do not have any post-processing software to change that, or anything really. That will be a whole other world of learning.
Overall, I got some good experience with the camera mechanics of photographing a child. I didn't even really pay attention to where the natural light was. But I hope as I get more experience, I'll feel more comfortable setting up shots. A big thank you to Kristen and Ayden for allowing me to experiment!
Because I don't have any children or pets of my own to experiment often on, I was reading into doing a weekly photo scavenger hunt. So I think my next post will focus on that!