Helpful tips for kid children photography
So you have a camera and you never have any luck getting wonderful images of your kids. Why can the pros seem to always get nice shots but your ten thousand images are just ok? Here are a few hints and suggestions to help boost your kid images to the next level.
These tips will work on all age kids from babies to toddlers.
- Clean up the chaos. So many images have clutter in the backgrounds which pulls your attention away from the child. Clean backgrounds and simple props work the best.
- Get to eye level before you take the image. If you have to lay on your back to get at their eye level than do it.
- Distract with noises and toys to gain the kids attention.
- Hold still. Find ways to get your kids to hold still for a split second while your camera captures the image. Moving images cause blur unless flash stops motion. Examples are toys, pictures, facial expressions, friends, etc.
- Pre-focus your camera so you are ready to take the image when the kid is still. Most cameras allow you to hold the shutter button halfway down and it will focus. Do this and be ready to fire the image when the child is ready.
- Shoot a larger aperature, f-stop, image to get more depth of field in focus. This typically means you also need more light. For example outside images.
- Run with them and capture images. If you run at the same speed as the child and capture images sometimes the background blurs and the child is in focus.
- If your camera will capture burst images with a few images captured at a time try this feature. Sometimes one out of the three or five is great.
- Use a flash to stop action. Warning here, typically the flash on consumer cameras stink. If you find that yours works great then use it for fill flash, catch light in eyes, stop motion images, and dark scenery at will. When you can, bounce the flash by putting a white card in front of it, to bounce it off of a white ceiling or wall.
- Erase memory cards and try and try and try.
