Taking the right expression

Hi all,

I've been trolling a lot here, but never found something to ask about, but here's one:

When taking candid photo's of people, how do you time it to know to capture a great expression? How do you avoid like, wierd intermediate expressions where the face is contorted, mouths in wierd shapes, or partially closed eyes. From what I can gather, you're kind of guessing, but I wanted to know whether there was a more technical or pragmatic approach.

Cheers all and thanks in advance for advice.

You COULD put it on multiple shot mode and just let it fly.....as long as there is lots of natural light so you aren't shooting with flash. Otherwise, you really can't control those things. Typically, that isn't a huge problem though. Most people, when socializing will laugh or smile at the person they are talking to. You only need 1/250th of a second to capture that. When taking candids though, don't ever show somebody an unflattering photo of themselves, or heaven forbid, post it anywhere. They will never trust you in the room with a camera again....

The very nature of candids mean you have little or, more likely, no control over the subject's expressions as they transition from one to another. Your best bet is to study the subject for a moment or two and then try to anticipate the shot. You'll become better at this over time and with practice.

Yes my advice would be to anticipate the shot. Have a good reaction time and look through the viewfinder waiting for "the moment". You may get a lot of dud shot but what digital for anyways? Just delete and try again.

Thanks for the tips all, gotta just shoot shoot shoot. Happy Halloween!

Mark_Cohran wrote in post #8915265
The very nature of candids mean you have little or, more likely, no control over the subject's expressions as they transition from one to another. Your best bet is to study the subject for a moment or two and then try to anticipate the shot. You'll become better at this over time and with practice.

It would also seem that you have less than optimal control of the perspective of the subjects in the images when shooting candids. For candids when indoors, I usually would want a wide to short telephoto zoom, whereas outdoors I would want a short to medium telephoto zoom.

Within these zooms, there is still a lot of range. Do you also find when anticipating the candid that you are also trying to physically move to a distance to have some control over the perspective? I tend not to lock onto a single person, instead looking around to see what might be of interest to capture.

I have heard of some being able to capture candids with a fixed focal length lens. I find that impressive.

One trick I do is to have them do a 'posed smile' and I usually take another picture immediately right after. The best results, from my experience, have been to tell jokes or say something funny while taking pictures.