Photographing Kids: The Picture AFTER the Picture

I am blessed in many ways. I am married to a splendid woman and we travel the world together. I have a world-class cat. I love what I do for a living and...I am blessed with little people in my life who are happy to pose.

This young lady is one of those people. Here are three pictures from dozens taken during a fifteen minute session on our back porch one summer afternoon.

She has known me since birth. We are comfortable together. But she was still only five years old. In working with "little people" there are a lot of things to keep in mind.

First: you need to keep talking. Photographers have a lot to think about: settings, the subject, the light, the composition. We have a tendancy to want to concentrate on taking the shot and ignoring the subject.

This doesn't work with kids.

You need to keep communicating. You need to keep the child engaged in the process. You need to make them laugh, to look in the directions you want them to look. You need to keep your model engaged in the whole process. There has to be a powerful link to the process between the photographer and the subject.

You need to keep shooting. We (as in the royal "photographer we") have a habit of checking the LCD screen and the histograms to see what we got.

Don't do this when you are working with kids. The idea is to have nothing coming between you and the child. The camera has the potential to become one of those things: it's a big mysterious box to little eyes. Ideally, the camera becomes part of the whole adventure and doesn't represent something scary or misunderstood to the child. In order to keep shooting there are a couple of things that make the process smoother:

1) Do all your settings and camera fiddling before you start with the child. That's important because you need to concentrate on just shooting once the session starts.

2) Use a Burst or Sports Mode. Kids move very quickly and emotions flicker across their faces like vapor. You need to shoot very quickly so you can catch every nuance of what they do.

3) Keep the atmosphere positive. There should be lots of laughter and lots of positive words spoken. The child needs to feel confident and have the ability to relax in front of the camera.

Take the picture AFTER the picture. This is one of the most valuable things I have learned from watching my wife work with people. She's done a ton of portraits. One day I realized how she got such great candid looking shots.

She would take the shot they expected her to take. Just as they were leaving, she'd engage them in conversation and then she would say something funny. When they responded, she would take the shot and she'd consider that the portrait.

It's a technique I have used (okay copied) many times. It works like a charm.

You will get "real person."

And the "real person" is much more interesting than those unnatural posed shots, which are particularly awful when children are in them.

Photographing Kids

Kids are great to photograph, right?

They are unpretentious, they are sincere and -- if you can get the right kid -- they are wonderful subjects.

On the flipside, you need to forge a personal bond with them, some kind of relationship, that allows them to be comfortable in front of a camera and natural in all they do. It's that "naturalness" you are trying to capture in that split second the camera gives you to take the shot.

If you planned to take a picture of an adult, you would take the time to invest yourself in getting to know them, right? It's no different for kids. You need to take time to kibbitz with them, to get to know them and then the great gates of images open.

I spent close to half an hour with the child in this picture. She happens to be my granddaugher, but the fact that I was sitting on my porch, taking picture after picture may have served to make the whole picture taking process more difficult. The photographer, whether they are photographing children or adults, needs to realize that the camera itself is a barrier to interacting with the subject. It's a great black block of matter that shows them to the world. While it's true that kids are less likely to flinch in the face of the lens, it's also true that, as an artist, you are looking for a way to present that youthful presence to an audience.

In this particular picture, she was walking away and then turned to say something to me over her shoulder. I captured the image here and so the image is held here in that second.

Take time to understand the subject of your portrait. Try to capture them in that fraction of a second where they show you who they are. Respect them as complete people.

For this picture, I copied my layer and then converted the picture to black and white. Then I worked on the Opacity, reducing the blend between the two to 50%. This adds a nice "hand tinted" look to the photo -- predominantly on the dress and hair highlights.

The picture was then flattened and framed and we're done.