We all take thousands of pictures of our kids, but 99.9% of those photos end up looking terrible. What if I told you it’s possible to improve your photos dramatically in 10 minutes?
This project assumes you know how to turn on your camera, use the flash, take a photo and attach the camera to your computer. We won’t be doing anything more fancy than that and your photos will still improve by leaps and bounds… so let’s get started!
Sometimes the most complex process can be broken down into the simplest rules. That’s exactly what the folks at Kodak have done for you with their Top 10 Tips for Great Picture overview. Go ahead and view it now and take 10 minutes to think about how you can start incorporating at least one tip in every frame you shoot. I guarantee that if you just use these simple tips your photographs will improve immediately and with very little effort on your part. You might also want to check out their tips on photographing children and babies.
When you’re ready, go out and shoot at least 50 photos (hey, digital is free!) of your kids doing one thing– playing ball, doing a puzzle, or some other activity– and incorporate at least one Kodak rule in every shot you take. Did your images improve? Now try it again, but shoot 100 images.
This is how the pros shoot; they find a subject that interests them and then keep shooting it from different angles, distances, and in different light until they start getting shots that work well for them. The idea that you can pick a subject and take a single frame of it and have it turn out is a very “snapshot mentality” and rarely works. Go ahead and shoot to your heart’s content– I promise your images will improve as a result.
To get you started, here’s an example from my own life. Like all newborns, my daughter had trouble focusing properly on objects close to her. I wanted to capture that, and my mom wanted a picture of her in her bouncy seat, so I shot the following series (click to scroll through the images). As you can see, I kept shooting until I got “the money shot” that made us both happy:
Please remember that 95% of taking good photos is about developing your sense of what makes a good photo (including composition and lighting), NOT how expensive the camera you are using is. Sure high-end cameras have better lenses and are more sensitive, but you can take bad pictures with them just like you can take great pictures with a cheap point-and-shoot
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