Photo Tips on Photographing Children
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.
