How To Get Good Pictures of Your Kids

This is my daughter Josephine. These photos were taken one day after I picked her up from preschool. Our tomato plants had been going nuts and I had noticed that our first red ones were ready for picking, so out came the camera.

Josephine, for the most part, likes having her picture taken, but I don't think that this happened by accident. I've been photographing kids professionally since well before she was born and I've watched how kids develop this awful grimace when told to smile. They don't really know how to smile on command, but they try, and it's often not the look you want for a photograph. Also, if they are trained well, that's the only look they do when you point the camera at them. Mostly what I've learned from photographing kids is that they don't take direction, so you need to be intuitive, patient and fast when taking their picture.

DON'T SAY SMILE

So, with Josephine, instead of saying, 'smile' when I'm taking her picture, I think of something to say that will make her smile, or pull my head away from the camera and make a silly face at her. Often I tell her there are turtles inside the lens (although she's getting too old to fall for that one). This is a good trick for younger kids though, they often stop and look in the lens just long enough for you to snap off a few images. If you are close enough, you can reach out and give them a little tickle. I think that doing things like this has made it fun for Josephine to get her picture taken, and so when she sees the camera, she already knows we're going to have some fun.

WAIT

What you want to capture is beyond just a smile, but a little bit of their personality. Wait to see what they will do for you. Even if you think a photo won't be a good one, in the age of digital, why not keep taking them, just to see? What you are waiting for is the break in that action, for that moment when they are the most natural and unposed.

GEAR

If you are lucky enough to have a DSLR, you should have a fast lens. When I say fast I'm referring to the biggest lens opening that your lens has. So look on your lens, does it say 2.8, 4 or 5.6? What is best is 2.8 or better yet, 1.8 (the smaller numbers actually refer to bigger lens openings, that is because there is supposed to be a one over these numbers). If you have a wide aperture on your lens (a 2.8 or 1.8) it makes it much easier for your camera to focus. A lot of zooms don't have very wide apertures, so they are slow with focusing, and it makes it harder to capture the quick movements of children. There are fixed lens that are very fast and also pretty cheap. Try a 50mm 1.8, they usually run about $80 and you can shoot with them in low light with out a flash.

If you don't have a DSL, look in your instruction manual and see if you have a high speed shooting mode that will take multiple exposures quickly. Shoot a lot, and delete the bad ones.

Happy picture taking!

See the Kids Portfolio at http://www.smcintyre.com/