[BityBabyNurse]

Here's my crew. I love the truthfullness of them being theirselves, but I am having problems with focusing. First of all I realized I made a mistake in using my 50mm prime lens, on AV mode, so do you think I should have used a shutter priority and manuel focus and a zoom lens on these type shots where the subject isn't going to sit completely still? C&C welcomed!

[P-E]

Nice capture

I will let someone else advise technically who knows what they are talking about (re shutter priorty etc)

[Dabhand16]

No easy answer to this one. Arguably, Av mode is a 'creative' mode where you can control (or try to control!) depth of field. TV mode is more commonly associated with sports/action shooting where you might want to either 'freeze' a moment, or maybe control the blur to suggest movement.

A lot of situations will be in the middle ground when you might want to influence/control both.

You can use Av mode for the sort of shots you are describing here, but keep an eye on the shutter speed. If you have good light you will probably find that it will be high enough to capture the sort of movement that the kids will demonstrate. If not, you might want to nudge up the ISO a bit otherwise switching to TV might open the lens too much for the situation you are in.

In the picture you have posted, DoF is not really an issue as they are all in the same plane and the shot is quite contained, so TV will probably be OK. If they were in a larger space and a bit more spread out, DoF will be a more important issue.