I thoroughly enjoy photographing children and have opportunity to do quite a bit of it lately after many of our friends have had babies.
Probably the most important tip I’ve learned in photographing them is to get on their level. So many of my friends show me photos of their kids which are taken from 4 or so feet above the child which does nothing but dwarf them and make them look almost toy-like.
Getting on your hands and knees or crouching down before you take a shot of a child takes you into their world and helps you to engage with them through the images you take.
Photographing Babies
Babies are particularly difficult to photograph because they are so immobile. I find that one of the best ways to get good shots of them is to put them on a baby rug and too literally lie down next to them with your camera right on the floor. In this way you’re looking directly into their big beautiful eyes and it puts the viewer of the photo in the unique perspective of an eye to eye place. If the child has the ability to lift it’s head the effects can be amazing as you almost find yourself looking UP into their eyes.
Photographing Older Children
The same principle of getting down low applies with older children although you do have a little less lying on the floor with them when they are at an age of walking.
I particularly find that with older children the best time to photograph them is when they are doing something that they enjoy. Go to the park with them and their parents, visit their house when they are painting pictures, get them to take you on a tour of their room or take them out to play their favorite sport.
While they are doing their activity hover around (at their level) and take plenty of shots. Also include shots with them and their parents and keep an eye open for those candid moments when they fall over, do funny expressions or ham it up for the camera.
If your camera has a continuous shooting mode it might also be worth keeping that on with bigger kids who tend to move around more. As I look back at the times I’ve done this it’s quite interesting to see that it’s often the second or third shot in a sequence that is best. Shooting just one frame at a time can mean you miss these golden opportunities.
Another benefit of continuous shooting is that you can end up with a great series of shots that might go nicely together to tell a story (see below).
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Of course it’s not just still life objects that become more interesting to look at when you examine them from new angles - people do also.
People come in all shapes and sizes and to photograph them from the stock standard six foot high standing position just doesn’t do them justice.
Experiment with getting down as low as you can or find a way to climb above them and you might just find yourself discovering a new angle on your subject that adds that special something to how they express themselves in an image.
At a recent wedding I took the principle to extremes on occasion throughout the day and while the couple included a lot of more ’standard’ shots in their album they also selected some of the more unusual angles as feature shots. Here are a few shots (excuse my lack of post production on them at this stage):
From Above
In this first shot we were lucky enough to be able to get on a bridge and shoot down onto a car park.
From Down Low
After taking some shots of them crouching down in front of their car I decided to get even lower for a few random and quick shots. I was using a wide angle lens that got plenty of sky (some a little too much of it).
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One of the most effective ways to make your digital images more interesting to the eye is to change the angle that you’re shooting from.
Let me use an illustration of a couple of pictures I took of a big pineapple (don’t ask - it’s an Australian thing).
In my opinion the first picture is more interesting than the second. While the second one might be good for putting the big pineapple in context of it’s surroundings and giving an accurate picture of ‘how big’ it is - I’m much more likely to get a ‘wow’ factor using the first one (although it’s by no means a brilliant shot for other reasons).
There are a number of differences between these pictures in terms of composition. For starters the first is closer and fills the frame (I’ll write about this in a future post) but for the purposes of this composition tip I want to talk about the angle that I shot the two shots from.
The second shot is taken by me standing some distance from the pineapple as I approached it. In the first shot I got much closer and crouched down to accentuate my smallness and the pineapple’s bigness. I could have gone a step further and lay down on the ground to shoot it for even greater impact.
Not only does changing the angle that you shoot from impact the feeling of size of your subject but it can have a real effect upon the light and shade and patterns on it. You can see in the picture on the left that the patterns on the pineapple are more pronounced as a result of the angle I shot it from.
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Most digital camera users fit somewhere on a spectrum between two extremes when it comes to taking planning their digital images.
1. The Snap Happy Photographer - we’ve all see these digital camera users (and most of us are guilty of it ourselves also). Planning their images extends to switching on the camera, holding it at arms length on the most obscure angle possible and pressing the shutter release at a random over and over again with little thought to their subject’s position within the frame.
The results at the end of the day from these photographers are an unpredictable roller-coaster ride between some wonderfully creative shots which they claim they meant (but really were just lucky with) and the bizarre (out of focus shots of ear).
2. The Over Planner - we’ve all posed for this type of photographer at one time or another. They spend what seems like hours getting you positioned just right (so that the sun will bounce off the waterfall behind us just right) and then spend long slow minutes staring into their view finder and playing with the controls on their digital camera to ensure the exposure is just right.
Once the shutter is released you relax and try to move on only to find that the first shot was a ‘test shot’ and that they need to go through the whole process again because the sun had moved since they positioned you and the glare on the waterfall made your face invisible.
Ok - I’m talking in extremes and I’m making these two types of photographers sound almost evil - but the fact of the matter is that the best photographers that I know take the best of both scenarios.
They have a unique ability to be creative, experimental and spontaneous like our happy snapper but they also think before they shoot in order to make the shots that they take count.
My advice to new photographers is to have fun and shoot lots of frames - but also to take their time and consider the photos that they are shooting BEFORE they go into happy snapping mode.
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The difference between a ‘nice’ and ’stunning’ digital photograph can be as simple as a change in composition. The framing of shots, the angle from which you shoot at, the placement of points of interest and the colors and contrast of a shot all play important parts in taking digital photographs to the next level.
Over the next few weeks we’ll be examining a range of simple composition techniques that you might like to try to add a new dimension to your photographs. Many of them come will naturally for some of you who have ‘an eye’ for a good shot - but for many of us they are techniques that we need to learn, remind ourselves of, practice and in time incorporate into our natural photographic rhythm.
I’ll link to each tip I write in this post as I write them. Here they are:
Here’s a neat tip for digital photographers trying to shoot at slow shutter speeds without image-stabilized (IS or VR) lenses. Actually, it can even be helpful for those using IS/VR lenses when you’re really pushing the limits of hand-holdability.
Set your camera to burst mode, frame your subject, brace yourself as firmly as you can, and squeeze the shutter button gently. Hold it down so that you fire off a burst of about 3-5 images. Odds are, once you get back to your computer and examine the images, there’ll be one image that’s considerably sharper than the rest. Delete the duds, and keep this good one!
The downside is obvious - you’ll use up a lot more space on your memory cards.
If you’re shooting in JPG mode and want a quick way to tell which image is the sharpest, just look at the file sizes. The one with the largest file size is nearly always the sharpest shot. This is because the JPG algorithm tries to preserve detail - the sharper your image, the more fine detail is present, and the less the JPG algorithm is able to compress the image. Incidentally, this is why high-ISO JPGs are larger than low-ISO JPGs of the same scene - the higher noise in the high-ISO image adds lots of fine detail, so the image can’t be compressed as much.
Of course, just like real IS/VR this technique only helps with correcting for camera shake. A moving subject and a slow shutter speed will still result in motion blur in the image.
