Senior Wii - update

Last week, I got a call asking me to photograph seniors playing the video game Wii. Seniors, as in seniors in high school? Nope. Seniors as in senior citizens.

Turns out it's a super way to stay active for the older set.

It's a sweet story how the Wii came to the senior residence hall. The woman on the right, the home's activities director, had gone to a family party with lots of relatives in various parts of the house. She said she was surprised to go into the den to discover her grandmother playing Wii. This is a grandmother who is not particularly mobile.

The grandmother had joined in the game when one of the teen cousins saw her watching him play the game. He simply asked if she'd like to try and she had said yes.

The teens and grandmother enjoyed a wonderful afternoon together, and the activities director decided to bring the Wii to the home where she worked.

The photo technique here is a favorite for showing motion. I wanted the woman's face -- with her intent gaze -- to be perfectly in focus, while her swinging arm to be blurred to depict her quick movements.

I worked in manual mode, for the most control. I set the shutter slow enough to capture the blur. It was likely around 1/30 or 1/15. I then set the aperture to underexpose the background just a bit. Easiest way to do that? Take a guess at the right aperture, shoot a frame, then look at the histogram. Adjust the aperture until you like what you see. I usually do this a bit away from the subject, so they don't get too concerned that I'm taking a lot of frames.

Then, with my shutter and aperture set, I handheld a flash off-camera with my left hand, and shot in TTL mode, so the flash would sort out the right exposure on the woman for me. Gotta love that technology.

So why isn't everything blurry with such a slow aperture?

The natural light in the room is mostly behind the woman, so the light on her face is even less bright than the light in the rest of the room. Since I underexposed the background, she would have been really quite underexposed had I not used flash. This is the same reason sometimes pictures at the beach turn out with a bright sky and people whose faces are too underexposed to see. (So no, it's not crazy to use flash on a sunny day at the beach)

Then the flash helped freeze the action. Since the flash helped to illuminate the woman, and the flash is very fast -- much faster than 1/15 of a second -- it effectively froze her in time and kept most of her from being blurry.

Also very important in this image, the woman's hand was moving much faster than the rest of her body. The flash couldn't stop this blur because there was just enough ambient light on her to create the "ghosting" I was after.

Sounds harder than it is, really. It's an easy one to practice if you have a willing pet, friend, child, or significant other.

License images of senior citizens playing the wii video game for editorial use here.