Category: Foto

Film is cheap, digital photography is free! Even when I’m photographing a model in a studio with controlled lighting, hair and make-up I still wouldn’t dream of just taking one picture. When photographing my children there are far too many factors that can go wrong and spoil the picture. Blinking, runny noses, dribble, looking the wrong way, food been shoved in ears and up noses, sudden crying because daddy has got his big camera out.

If I get the perfect picture from just pressing the button once it’s luck. Your children, apple of your eye they may be, very rarely do what they are told! Especially when it involves sitting still for the camera.

When working with children you have a very limited window of opportunity of between 30 seconds to 3 minutes before all ends in tears. Work out your shot before hand; take a couple of test pictures using a teddy or doll as a substitute for your child. This way you can check how the lighting looks and what the back is doing and the overall look of the picture, making any adjustments before you start the shoot for real.

Once your child is in place keep taking pictures, don’t review each picture on the camera screen after you’ve taken it as 1. Your child will want to see what you are all looking at. 2. It will eat into your window of opportunity. You and your partner/helper should work as a team, the photographer solely involved in getting the picture whilst the other is responsible for crowd control and model positioning.

When someone else is taking photos – as a parent always stand behind the camera / photographer, your child will always want to look at you so to ensure that your child is always looking towards the camera stand behind it. If you stand to one side saying, “Look at the camera” your child is only going to look at you!!

Missa inte den nya fototävlingen som du hittar här.

Anthony Cake is a freelance photographer from the UK. Read more about him in this earlier post or on his own website. Read earlier guest posts with photo tips from Anthony here.

Capturing an epic sporting moment of your child is one of the occasions when having a more advanced camera does help. Firstly the most important thing is get your camera set up correctly. Most compact cameras will have a sports mode setting, which is normal a picture of a person running or similar athletic pose. Setting your camera to this mode will make the camera only use faster shutter speeds freezing the action. On some cameras it will also set the ASA (film or sensor speed) to a higher setting. Personally I would manually set the ASA to at least 400ASA to ensure that the shutter speed will be fast enough, on a bright summers day you may be able to use 200ASA. If you leave your camera on Auto or program than the camera will use an exposure that it feels will produce the best photograph under the circumstances, this may and very often mean a shutter speed of around 1/60 or 1/125 which will usually result in any movement being a blur.

More advanced cameras will let you choose the shutter speed that you wish to use, aim for a shutter speed of 1/500 or higher depending or the sport your child is partaking in, if you want to stop a tennis ball in mid air then shutter speeds of 1/1000 to 1/2000 are needed.

If you have a very basic camera then if you can set the ASA to a higher rating 400-800 (the same rule applies for using film) and this will force the camera to use faster shutter speeds to get a correctly exposed image.

Follow the action with the camera, don’t just wait for a great shot to run / swim / jump into the frame. Use a zoom lens the get close to action and follow action. Think about where you are going to take your pictures from? If it is the school running race then stand near the finish line, that way you capture all the action as they run towards you. If you were to stand at the start then yes, you may get one great picture of all the participants at the start line but that’s it, the rest of your photographs will be of the backs of heads rapidly getting smaller and smaller. Similar for a football match, stand near one of the goals as that is where everybody is trying to get the ball so everybody will be looking / heading in that direction at some point.

Right this is the technical bit. Remember the faster the shutter speed the faster the aperture will be, or a smaller number the f stop ie f2.8 or f4.0. Those of you with DSLR may be familiar with apertures or f stops. With most compact cameras it’s taken care of for you. But if you have a low f stop number of say f3.5 then you will have a smaller amount of the picture that will be in focus – maybe only 10 – 20cms where as if you have an f stop of 11 then 2 – 4 meters may in focus. Confused yet? Basically it means that you have to make sure that your subject is in focus as there will be very little room for error. If you have a DSLR set the focus to servo or continuous.

Don’t expect miracles straight away, watch what is going on around you. Your subject may be repeating the same action again and again and again. This will help you to be able to time your photograph, capturing the moment!

Good Luck!

This weeks photo competition theme is ‘Sport / action photos’, read more about the competition here.

Anthony Cake is a freelance photographer from the UK. Read more about him in this earlier post or on his own website.

Get up close with a tight crop when you are composing your picture. Remember you are photographing your child, not the contents of your living room or garden!

The human eye / brain combination is very clever at disregarding any irrelevant background clutter and zooming in on the main subject. Your camera is not so good at this unless you tell it to, resulting in what you thought was going to be a great picture ending up as a small child disappearing into a cluttered background.

The main reason for this is that usually you will place the face of the subject in the middle of the viewfinder / screen, focus on it and forget about everything else that is happening in the rest of the frame.

The cure? Use the zoom lens on your camera or getting in close to the subject. The later can have the disadvantage of your prized camera being on the receiving end of a frenzied assault by sticky fingers, snotty noses and endless amount of drool. There is no cure for this other than perseverance, your child will eventually get bored and go back to what they were doing, but have a cloth to hand in order to clean the lens.

Using the zoom lens on your camera enables you to keep a safer less obtrusive distance from your subject. Your child however will still insist on coming over to see what you are doing, so you will have to sit and wait until they get bored or photograph them when they are deeply engrossed in what the are doing.

This weeks photo competition theme is ‘Close ups’, read more about the competition here.