How to Photograph Kids

How to Photograph Kids Male: Okay, another tip about photographing people especially kids. When you put the camera up like this in front of you, they’re not seeing your self. There is a personality there. Especially with kids, this is what I’m going to do. What this. Can I have your name again? Sophia: Sophia. Male: Could I shake your hand again, Sophia? You know, you have beautiful eyes and you have a the name of my favorite actress Sophia Loren. Now, what I’m doing here again is that I’m coming down at her level. I’m looking at here in the eye. Okay, Sophia. Look at those beautiful eyes. Okay, now I took a picture in the shade. Let’s do this, I had to get the picture. I got a picture of this beautiful young lady. But Sophia, could we take a little stroll? Okay, here’s another tip. This young lady has beautiful eyes. We’ve got beautiful light right now. But unfortunately, they’re on her face and she’s going to squint. So this is what I’m going to do. We have her against a nice backdrop, I’m going to walk over like this, I’m going to get down to her level once again and then we go. And she’s posing for us too. Okay Sophia, turn to me. Is the sun still in your eyes? Now there we go. Good, oh she’s posing. We got an actress here. Okay, Sophia, let’s take another walk. Okay good. Another example of working with the right light. The light was very glaring over there, very harsh on even an adult and a professional subject. We have this very cooperative and beautiful young lady and what I did right now was I walked over with these bushes over here, the sunlight is coming through here and filtering the image. Now, I go the light on her eyes. Sophie, that’s beautiful. Okay, another example of working with the right light. The light was very glaring over there, very harsh on even an adult and a professional subject. We have this very cooperative and beautiful young lady, and what I did right now was I walked over with these bushes over here, the sunlight is coming through here and filtering the image. Now, I got the light on her eyes. That’s it. Sophie, that’s beautiful. That’s good. Now look over there, great. Okay. Now, we have a very fluttering light. It’s not harsh, it picks up all her features especially her blue eyes. Okay another thing, not every great picture is when the subject is looking at you. Having a subject looking off careens a more candid shot. It’s different. It’s from another angle. Again, take a variety of pictures. Now, I could take pictures of her all day long. I’m going to take maybe one or two more pictures. Sophie, can you jump in the air for me? Okay. Young lady, thank you. Always show respect for your subjects, always connect with them even when you finish shooting because this way, they’ll shoot again tomorrow. Thank you Sophia. Flashback Pictures’ Review Okay, what we have here again is the lighting problem. What’s happening here is that the kid in shade, we have a very washed out background but we took this picture simply because we want to get the kid into the mode of having picture taken. It’s a nice picture but it’s too limited. Alright, the lighting is a little bit better but you know what’s happening, the light is coming into the little girl’s eyes. The problem is we don’t want to make her uncomfortable. We want to keep the kid as comfortable as possible and keep them as cooperative as possible. It’s not a bad picture but let’s see what else we can get. Alright, we’ve kept her cooperation. She’s still working with the picture. She’s beginning to move around a little bit, her hands over her head. We got a little motion, it’s an interesting picture, we have a disconcerting background due to the light. But also, the lines of the boards in the background echo her hand. So it’s beginning to come together. We’re keeping the kid’s cooperation, we’re working with her. We’re basically letting her do what she wants. Now, we’re working at this a little bit more. See the ways her arm is going around her head, we’ve got the features on this side. So we’ve gone to bring out a little bit more of her face. It needs a little bit but it’s getting stronger. We’ve kept a cooperation. What we’ve done here is we just changed our position. Remember the other pictures where we changed our position to work with our limits. What we have now here is something interesting in the background. The green offsets the pink of her shirt and her pants and her little burette on her hair. We’ve got a little problem with the shade but we’ve got some nice light on her eyes there. She’s relaxed. Her hands are on her knee. And we’ve got an interesting angle there leading from the hands up to the side of the face. We’ve also gone down to her level. We’ve tried something a little bit different here. We’re down on the ground again, the background is a little dark but she turned away from the picture and now she’s completely not posing. There’s something interesting about her looking off. Again, we have a little bit of problem with the shade but you notice how the light is coming in on her eyes that more than compensates for making an interesting picture. Okay, we’re still dealing with the shade problem but what we’ve done is we’ve come completely down to her level. She’s looking directly into the eye of the camera. This is how you want to connect with children. Children are always looking up and we’re looking down at them. Sitting down, she’s looking at us, we’re in equal footing with this child and she’s on an equal footing with us. We still got a problem with the light but the eyes are looking directly in the camera. So again, sometimes a picture can be distracting for certain reasons but if you have the right elements in the picture like the eyes, the level, it’s going to more than compensate. Now, we’ve got a little bit of shading problem here. Notice to her right side how dark it is and then how the background moves to a little bit being light so we have the light and shade? But what we’ve done here is we’ve worked with a really interesting angle. She’s off set to the left and her eyes move to the right. Her eyes are also in line with the pavement behind which is a little bit lighter. The picture works because she’s looking out to the side, she’s not paying attention to us. And even though we have a little problem with the lighting, we have a strong image. Why does this picture work? Well, it works because we’re down on the child’s level. The child is looking at us. The shading has emphasized the blue of her eyes. But you may notice she sat to the left. Well, here’s a subtle psychological reason why this works. You know when we open a book, we read left to right. Now, what we’ve done here is we’ve included our little on camera flash. Now, it opens up to details on the face a little bit. It brings out the grass a little bit and at some ways, it’s a much clearer picture but it loses the drama that’s in the other picture. The shading in the previous picture emphasizes her eyes a little bit more. There’s something about this picture that’s just a little bit too common. Remember how we’ve discussed patience and waiting for a picture or waiting for the right elements to come into place. This is what happened in this picture. We asked the child to wave to the camera and at that point, the sun broke through the trees and began to eliminate a little bit of the shade. It picks up the pink of her clothing, it picks up the blue of her eyes, how red her lips are, the little red burette in her hair and we’ve got a perfect exposure on the green of the grass at the background. We also came down even lower on the picture and eliminated the distracting background above her head in the earlier pictures. What we’ve done here is tried a different approach. We’ve included more image in the picture, we’ve worked more with the environment, we’ve began to include the lawn behind her. We’re working a little bit with the shade again and there’s something very dramatic about this picture. She’s off to the left a little bit but she’s looking to the right. Her eyes are drawn in both directions but we keep coming back to the child. There’s something very beautiful about the child’s profile especially her eyes, how they’re emphasized by putting the sidewalk just behind her there. It picks up the light of the sidewalk and you could see it just in her eyes. This is what children like to do. They like to run around. We asked the good little girl to jump up in the air and you noticed how we set the picture vertically, how the trees in the background going up and down, well that emphasizes as an echo to the jump of the child. She’s there in the center, we’ve got a little bit of a lighting problem again but there’s enough light coming in on the pink of her pants and a little bit on her face to kick up the images a little bit. What we’ve done here is that the child thought we stopped shooting and she had gone off to play. What the photographer did was walk up to the top of the porch and just started taking pictures of the kid in motion on how she is. See how it leaves off to the side, how she’s running across the circle. When you’re taking pictures, look for interesting objects, things that may be distracting in one picture and can emphasize another picture and really make it work. What we’ve done here is we’ve waited for the child to move a little bit. She started at the right side and now she’s moving to the left. Sometimes, what you might want to do when you’re taking pictures is to actually include two pictures when you lay or frame them. We have the child moving from the right to the left and now she’s moving off into the left. She jumped over three of those circles. Alright, once again, we’re working with light here. The lighting is a little bit off, the pink is a little bit washed out, the background is a little washed out there too but not so much that it would disconcert us from the entire image. What we’re working here is—what we’re emphasizing here is the motion of the child. Remember how we’re working with the motion of the puppies before, how sometimes the key element could be motion, how it could composition. What we’ve done here is worked with emotion. We’ve go her leaping from one circle to the next. What we did here was just ask the kid to go over to the water and look at it and tell us what she saw in there. She’s not aware she’s being photographed or even if she is, she’s not paying much attention to it. She’s holding her cup, it’s a toy that children have. She’s holding something that means something to her. See how those pink and the white right now and the red of her burette are kicking out from the grass. Even though we have a little bit of a shade here, this time it’s working. She’s looking over to the left side of the picture and we see the water in there. I wonder what she’s looking at. It’s got her attention.