I am not a professional photographer by any means, but I do take thousands of pics of my kids per year — literally thousands! These are a few tips on how I manage to provide consistent stream of kid pics for my Instagram.
1. Plan Ahead of Time
Having a plan for the type of shots you want to take is important for outdoor photos. Kids have a short attention span and the golden hour doesn’t last long. Test out on a different day the different settings for your camera, and check the weather so that you will know what type of settings you’ll need to use.
Use Your Autofocus
For novice photographers like me, I recommend using predictive autofocus. It works well for moving targets, such as Devin, who prefers to run from the camera. You can lock on the image before you take the picture so that you can track the movement before you take the shot.
People Look Great Outdoors
Kids are cute regardless. There is hardly any lighting that makes them look bad, but natural lighting provides beautiful amounts of light and gorgeous backdrops. If your subject is the landscape with a person in it, it will help the audience gain perspective. If your focus is the person, then the backdrop of nature can be blurred out so that the person shows up more.
Right Place Right Time
The best shots happen when you are in the right place at the right time. When you see some great scenes happening, don’t delay or worry about camera settings – just start taking pictures. Set it on autofocus and automatic and just start framing the images. The frame is more important than your worrying about camera settings. ( This is also why I end up taking most of my photos with my iPhone) Kids, especially little kids, don’t have time in their busy schedules to wait for you to set up your camera.
Adjust Your Exposure
If you really want to capture the vivid colors better, then it’s all about exposure. Play with the exposure, starting with dialing it down by -.05. It’ll make the image sharper, and the blacks look blacker and the colors look more colorful.
Look Down
The ground offers a great choice of background for portraits. Have your subject lay down and arrange some leaves around them, or they can lie in a grass/flower field with their hair spread out. Nature provides a wonderful backdrop and they’re less likely to run away this way.
Remember the Rule of Thirds
When you are aligning your subject in the view finder, pretend there is a nine-square grid in which you can easily arrange the image. This means that there are four areas of interest in the photograph, which are the interceptions of the lines. This is why you don’t put a person in the center of a portrait most of the time but over to one side, with other things being in the shot too.
Zoom In
When you’re taking outdoor shots, remember to reduce the confusion in the shot by zooming in to make your main focus on what you want the people to see when they look at the image. A good way to do that is to get what you think is your shot in the viewfinder, then zoom in a bit to take out anything extra. I tend to take tight photos cropped close to the subject. That’s just what I like. There are many truly talented photographers who are masters with landscape shots, but I am not one of them.
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