Making the most of the sunshine

The heatwave continues and early cloud dissolved into another cloudless afternoon   today with the temperatures pushing the 30's. As fantastic as it is to  finally be enjoying a British Summer the wall-to-wall sunshine always gives some photographic challenges during the middle of the day. Today I decided I'd fight fire with fire and see if I could 'out-strobe' the sun. Getting the balance correct took a few attempts with under-exposing the ambient light by a few stops to get the sky an appropriate shade of blue, together with finding the correct power settings for the strobe in manual mode, which delivers more predictable results. The easiest part of this shot was getting the smiles however - today we had a very happy baby ! This is the black and white conversion, the colour image is now part of the Home Screen images on the website.