Shooting kids (with a camera)

I’ve found that the trick to getting good photos of kids is to just take zillions of pictures of them. Maybe not a zillion, but at least 100 per shoot. Kids won’t do what you ask them 90% of the time, so 90% of your pictures will be unusable. If you take 100 pictures, that’ll give you 10 good ones, and out of those 10 maybe 2 really good ones.

My 18 month old nephew Chase was the perfect example. I chased Chase (ha ha) around the house for a good long time just snapping away. He was not at all interested in having his picture taken or even sitting still for a minute. I took just about 100 pictures and ended up with 5 that I thought were really good. My favorite is the one pictured above. I was using my Nikon D80 with 50mm f1.8 lens and shot wide open with natural light the whole time. This one was done at 1/800 shutter speed and ISO 100.

And that’s another trick…a fast shutter speed to catch the expression. Kids won’t do any one thing for too long and their expressions change every ½ second. You have to keep shooting until you catch the right expression. After I hear the shutter click I immediately refocus and recompose, holding the shutter button down half way, and just wait for the right moment. Of course, once he moves, I have to refocus and recompose.

Some friends asked me to take a picture of their two boys (ages 6 and 4) sitting on the back of their ’63 Thunderbird during the holidays. These two were no different than my nephew, especially the 4 year old. Although they knew and understood why I was there, they still goofed off a lot. This is what kids do and I was expecting it. So I got in position and just started firing away. I took a total of 92 pictures and got two good ones.

The car was parked in their garage and I wanted to eliminate some of the clutter so I used the patch tool and the clone tool in Photoshop to clean it up, added the vignette and then fine tuned it in Lightroom. Below are the before and after results. I again used my 50mm f1.8 at 1/30 sec.





It’s also important to point out that digital photography makes this kind of shooting possible. I could never do this with a film camera (unless I had an endless supply of free film) and of course the touch ups are done digitally also.