Metering: The process of taking a light reading from a given area to determine what your camera settings should be for proper exposure of that area.

I remember my "Ah Ha!" moment very distinctly. It hit me one sunny afternoon while I was sitting on my couch, doing nothing in particular. I was several months into taking photography seriously and had spent countless hours pouring over every tutorial I could find. Suddenly everything I had been reading came crashing together in my mind, and from it a VERY useful piece of information floated to the top.

Getting my dial to center on my meter did NOT equal perfect exposure. Say What?!

I'm just going to say it. Overhead mid-day sunlight - not the friend of the momtographer. With the exception perhaps of the middle of the night, if you can pick any other light in which to take portraits, pick it. But that's the thing about Momtography - our job is to document our kiddos lives... and sometimes we can't help the light.  So our job is to take the big lemon in the sky and make photographic lemonade.

So why is it such a challenge?  Well, think about the light of the midday sun - it streams down directly and harshly from above. If you could even see their eyes under those squinty eyelids, they would be made dark by the shadows cast by their brow bones. And wow, the contrast just isn't' pretty… is that a nose or a sundial?

Sunflare.  It's a special kind of backlighting that happens when you put your subject inbetween the sun and your camera. It usually happens in the late afternoon (except for you odd early birds among us!), and the results range from colors that look like the lemonade of late summer, to wild lens flare, to silhouetted backlight.

The general idea is to face your camera west at sunset, and put your subject somewhere between you and the sun.

Keep the sun JUST slightly out of the frame, and here's what you get.

Depth of field.  It's that crazy thing that happens when your camera selects certain things to be in focus and other things out of focus. It's a beautiful storytelling tool when you know how to use it. And when you know how to make it work for you, it can make your portraits positively POP!

So this weekend, make sure you study up on your camera's aperture setting. It's the part of your lens that determines how much light you allow in to wait at the shutter. And it's also what determines the depth of field in your pictures.