Turning the down time in the pandemic into memories and learning to take better photos of our children with these photography tips!
This is a unique time in our history. School moved from the building itself to our kitchen tables, via the internet. Parks are closed and off limits. Many of us are laid off or working from home. This is a time we will never forget. While you are at home (hopefully enjoying some of your down time), I want to spread some knowledge around to help you capture this incredibly unique time. Here are my top five photography tips on how to capture your children in photos, so we can look back at this interesting time in our lives with joy.
1. Be Quick! Lets face it – kids have short attention spans. Getting them to sit and be posed will be difficult. And a forced smile is never as good looking as a natural smile. You are much better off letting them play around with their siblings and snapping some candid shots. You can definitely give the posed photos a shot, but be quick!! They won’t stay posed for long before they want to get moving! Let kids be kids, let them play, and you will end up with more genuine smiles than if you get them to say “cheese”!
2. Get down on their level. You don’t want to shoot down at the children (unless that is the purpose of the photo) and shooting up at them tends to give you a really good view of up their noses. A nicer way to compose your photos is at the child’s eye level. You will appear more as an equal if you are down on the floor with them.
3. Consider shooting in “sports mode”. I’m going to assume for the purposes of this blog that many of you are not shooting in manual mode (if you are, consider a shutter speed of 1/250 or shorter). Kids move a lot. The automatic mode in your camera tries its best to make the most appropriate decisions for your photo. Sports mode is designed to freeze motion, reducing motion blur in your photos. Since kids tend to be unpredictable and not so willing to sit still for very long, sports mode will shorten up the shutter speed for you, making your photos sharper and crisper than they may be in automatic mode.
4. Take a photo when they don’t know you are taking it. This ties in with tip number 1, but stay on the outskirts and don’t let them know you are snapping away. The un-expected photo is usually the winner with my clients, when they are in the midst of living life and not caring how they may look on camera.
5. Take photos of mom with the kids!! Moms are normally the photographer for the family, and as such, are often not in the photos!! Dads, take the camera from mom and make her go play with them while you take photos for her. She will appreciate it today and those kids will appreciate it when they are adults.
Give some of these photography tips a try while your kids are doing homework or playing with each other. I would love to hear how they turn out for you!
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