How to photograph bounce houses
I have two kids. A four year old and a five year old. They each have many friends. Each of these friends has one birthday per year. Therefore, almost every other weekend we are at one of the bounce houses in the area. Each time, I bring my camera with the hope of trying something new and getting some good shots of the kids.
As a result of this, I think I have a bit of experience from shooting at these places more times than I would like to count.
First some general things that I have noticed. While there are a number of different attractions at these bounce houses, the slide is bar far the easiest and most interesting to photograph. In general, it is where I have taken my favorite shots so far. However, it is also worth your time to try out some other areas from time to time.
In my opinion, by far the best lens for these types of photos is in the 70-200 range, at least on a full frame. A 24-105 lens may be helpful if you have a cropped frame camera. Image stabilization won’t help you here, as it does not freeze action. It can help when taking action shots, though in this environment they are very difficult to take because the action does not occur perpendicular to you.
I use the F4 version of the 70-200, which I believe works fine. If you have a 2.8, that will obviously work too but I don’t think you need one. Even with the F4 I often find myself wanting more DOF and I sometimes increase it to F5.6 in order to improve the odds that my shots are in focus.
In terms of lighting, I mount a 580EX on top of my camera and then use a Lumiquest 80-20 diffuser with a white card added. This does a decent job with the lighting but I also increase the ISO to 3200 most of the time with my Canon 5D Mark II. This allows me to improve the ambient light in the shot. With some bounce houses though, they are noticeably darker and therefore more difficult to photograph in.
The 5D Mark II is certainly not known for its high end autofocus, but it does its job admirably here. In low light situations though, it can be more difficult. I take the majority of my slide pictures from two locations – either straight in front of the slide or at an angle. However, in dark situations I often have to limit myself to straight on.
I always shoot these situations in AI servo and multiple shot. With the Mark II, this enables me to get around three or four shots as they come down. AI servo has a much more difficult time as the kids get closer, so most of my best shots are as they are on the most vertical part of the slide, versus when they are on the landing.
As always I prefer to shoot in manual mode. In truth, I am not shooting manually as the flash is automatically determined. However, I do not let the camera choose my ISO, shutterspeed, or aperture. I have already discussed ISO and aperture, but shutterspeed is extremely important here as well. I usually try to stay around the flash sync speed – 1/200 or 1/250 though if lighting conditions force me to I will shoot at 1/160. With action coming toward you, you generally do not need to exceed 1/250. Nevertheless, I do believe this is one occasion where you want to control the aperture and shutterspeed yourself and not let the camera figure this out or you will have OOF and blurry shots.
If you are not already very familiar with your camera, make sure you figure out ahead of time how to place your camera in multiple shot mode and AI servo. Once I spent some time trying to help a Nikon user figure out how to set his camera to multiple shot, but was unable to figure out their user interface.
I am obviously not an expert in these shots, but I hope this advice has still helped.
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Tags: bounce, children, Kids, photography