Today was my youngest son's third birthday. After he opened his presents we went outside for a little while so he could play with them. These are also times I like to play with my cameras. I shot the above picture with my old ("old" is so relative when it comes to digital cameras!) EOS 10d camera using a 15mm 2.8 fisheye lens. Here's how I got the above shot.

After metering for ambient light in manual exposure mode, I stopped down the f-stop and slowed the shutter speed down until I came up with a nice slow shutter speed for the ambient light -- the sun had already set, but there was still significant open-shade light at dusk. I came up with settings of 1/20th of a second, f7.1, ISO 100. A shutter speed of 1/20th of a second was a nice slow speed that would blur the background. I switched the camera to self-timer mode and activated the on-camera pop-up flash (knowing the flash would darken the background by a stop or two). I pressed the shutter release button (activating the self-timer), held my son by his arms and began to spin around with the camera hanging from my neck. As I was spinning I had to keep telling my son (who was having a blast being spun around by dad) to look at the camera...I also had to suck in my gut a bit to make sure the camera -- even with the fish eye -- didn't tilt up too high for the shot, since my son was only about 24" away from the camera. It took a few tries (primarily to get the timing of the exposure to be right when I had him turned toward the ambient light source in the background), but I came up with a series of fun shots of both my 3 year old son and his older sister.

This exercise is just another example of how trial and error (and chimping the LCD...he-he-he...) using a digital camera will yield some fun, creative images. You really couldn't do this (inexpensively anyway) with a film camera!