a1 Photo Tips

One of the most beloved subjects - our children! If you have children of your own, I bet you love taking pictures of them. (And maybe they haven’t gotten fed up with it yet, like my own son.)

The picture here by HAMED MASOUMI is a fine example of a child portrait. Note two things about it:

1. The camera was held at the boy’s eye level
2. The boy is NOT smiling

A common fault with pictures of little children is that the camera was positioned at the adult’s eye level - and therefore looking down at the child. Such a perspective is not flattering at all to the child and I suggest you avoid it - unless you have a specific purpose with it like emphasizing how small and vulnerable the child is. Which you might.

Another habit of some people is to expect every picture of a child to show off a SMILE. I have a close relative, for instance, who judges pictures of her grandchildren by whether they smile or not. Sure, children do smile sometimes but who expects them to do it ALL the time? What I mean is: if you manage to capture a child when it’s smiling, or laughing - great! But don’t try to force it.

Speaking of laughing children - behold this amusing example by “shouldbecleaning”!

This is a fantastic example of a so-called “snapshot”. The photographer simply managed to capture a spontaneous moment of life… in this case, a cake fight!

Generally, some of the best ways of getting good candid shots of children is when they are engaged in some activity and not aware of the camera.

Maybe they are engaged in cake fights… or perhaps in some other, less messy, activity like playing with some toy or riding around on a bicycle.

In such cases, when a child is moving around rapidly, you may try using the continous shooting mode of your digicam. In this mode, the camera snaps a series of pictures in rapid succession for as long as you keep your finger on the shutter release.

This is a great way of capturing the most interesting moment, which you’d likely miss otherwise.

Photographing babies:
This is a bit different than making pictures of older children. Since babies are so immobile, they are often photographed laying on a bed. This tends to again introduce a birds-eye perspective - the baby is seen from above and looks even smaller than it really is.

Things can get more interesting if for instance an adult is holding the baby, as in this fine photo by Raphael Goetter.

Such a little one is too small to put on any special “camera-look”, and simply IS. This I think is one of the things that make such baby-pictures so endearing. We feel the openness and freshness radiating from such a small child.

The important thing here is to simply make sure the baby feels comfortable and secure. If it does, then these positive feelings will show up clearly in the pictures.

- And of course you want to get some nice spooooky Halloween pictures, right? There is a wide range of subjects worth capturing - children trick-or-treating, Jack-o-Lanterns, people dressed out in more or less creative costumes (as in the picture here by “Bahman.“), and so on.

Much of the action happens after dark, which is the major challenge with Halloween photography.

1:St Halloween Photo Tip: Don’t Use Flash!

What? No flash? OK, I am not saying you should NEVER use flash for those Halloween-night shots - it might work if you do it right. What I’m thinking about is this mindless firing off of the built-in flash unit as soon as it gets a little bit dark… Often, a digital camera is pre-set to do this automatically when it detects that the ambient light is low, all due to the well-meaning intention from the camera manufacturer that people should NOT need to THINK!

What happens then is the Halloween atmosphere, which really is what you want to capture, is ruined. So what to do? Basically, I have covered that in a previous post about shooting in low light without flash, but I’ll repeat this in a nutshell.

- Use the highest ISO-setting the camera allows. This varies depending on how advanced your digicam is, but the higher the better. The pictures may come out a bit “grainy” but in this context it is OK.

- Find ways of supporting the camera on some solid object, or use a tripod. By doing that you can use very slow shutter speeds without getting blur due to camera shake.

Jack-o-Lanterns are tricky to get right. If you want to capture the effect in a night-shot, it is advisable to put two or three candles in it rather than just one.

The picture here by “orangeacid” is a rather successful example. Note that the highlights are very bright but not washed out. You may need to make several exposures at different settings to get it right.

Above all - have fun! Feel the special atmosphere. Go out and capture Halloween events from all different angles. For instance, try keeping the camera low and point it UP on people’s faces!
Happy Halloween!

Well, I guess most of us are open to improvement in one way or another. I have written an article with some tips on portrait photography before, but recently I also found this nice video about the subject. I feel it adds some information which I didn’t discuss in my post, so here goes!

episode 25, outdoor portraits #1 from Jim Talkington on Vimeo.

The purpose of this video is primarily to show how you go about getting the subject’s face well lit. Note also the following:

1. The sun is low in the sky - morning light, which is more gentle than the harsh midday sun
2. There is a great distance between the subject and the background, making it easy to render the background out of focus
3. They use a large reflector - you can make do with a much smaller home-made contraption, like a sheet of aluminum foil, if all you need is light up the face of the subject

Those are good tips - what the video does NOT show us is how to make the subject look relaxed and natural. Well, what do you expect happens when someone tells us “Now smile!”

Correct, what you get is a forced, un-natural smile. To avoid this, you have to give more time to interacting with your subject, to make her feel at ease and essentially forget all about the camera. To give you an example of a relaxed subject, I show one of the pictures from my previous post on portrait photography (by “lakshmi.prabhala“) once more here.

Again, the essence of a really good portrait is not just the technical qualities but also to a great extent what the subject’s facial expression communicates to us. Does it feel genuine, does it have depth? Do you feel you get a glimpse of the subject’s soul?

I believe those are some qualities which a good portrait should include.

Stay tuned for more photo tips from Sunnyman at A1PhotoTips - use the biggie orange button at the top of the page to subscribe to my RSS feed.