Capturing the Candid
Photographing the natural, candid moments between people is glorious. Candids capture peoples' essence in a different way than the posed photograph. It's not too challenging to capture a great candid photo with a few techniques.
As always, your image should have ONE subject. With a candid, I make sure I'm focused on one person. This way I keep my focus on one subject even if everyone is moving. This helps ensures I have a sharp focus.
To start, if you are unfamiliar with the manual settings for a camera use the action setting. If you are shooting in manual, just remember that you should have your settings based on your shutter speed. So turn up the ISO if necessary.
The focus is on the woman in both the top image and the one below. This is for two reasons: shutter speed and aperture. As it relates to shutter speed, the child is more likely to move spontaneously and quickly than his mother and I have a better chance of her being in focus. To stop the action, my shutter is set above 1/250 of a second for my 35mm lens. The second reason the focus is on the woman is that she is between the background and foreground. Even with a wide aperture of 4, I can get her in focus as well as her son, due to the depth of field.
Focus on the person in the foreground if you only want the person in the foreground to be in sharp focus. I chose to focus on the young person in the foreground in the image below. While a slow shutter speed created a bit of a soft focus on the young person, the aperture setting allowed the person behind them to also be in focus giving the overall image one of clarity.
After camera settings, the second component is composition. Wait for it while moving around your subjects. When the moment is right you will be in place for an expressive and compositionally interesting image. What's interesting? Triangles. The eye likes triangles. In the image below there are at least three triangles. The candid shot below was created by positioning myself to create a triangle with the two people and the horizon line.
