Free tips to taking beautiful photos of your children
Choose a simple background: Children are often dressed colorfully, or have t-shirts with patterns or characters. Try and find a background that’s uncomplicated, and take care to ensure there are no tree branches or telegraph poles ‘sticking out’ of your subject’s body or head in the background.
Experiment with composition: Photography composition is a huge topic with many rules, and most of these rules can also be broken to still create a compelling image. In the interests of simplicity, I’ll break this down to one piece of advice when photographing children – experiment with placing your child off-centre in the frame. In other words, don’t always take the photo with your subject right in the middle of the picture. (see my blog post on composition here)
Alter your perspective: getting down at their level can really help when photographing children. Well it’s now time to break that rule, but we’re still going to be using an angle of view that’s not normal. Photographing kids from above can give an interesting perspective. If you have a tilting LCD screen on your camera, you’ll find this much easier – look at the final tip in this series for cameras I recommend that have this feature.
Use scale: following on from the previous tip, sometimes it’s a fun photo to make the child seem really small, or at least, small in comparison to the other objects in the frame. This can be as simple as putting the child on a large arm chair, having them wear adult boots, or stepping right back to shoot them from a distance against a large object such as a wall.
Check out more great tips for taking natural photos of your children here!