Child photography: How to photograph children

Try to get the kids in a good mood. If you have time, wait for the child or children to be in a good mood naturally. If you don’t have time, work with what you have. A portrait of a child being sullen can be just as evocative as a smiling child (and sometimes more realistic!).

If you can, have the children dress in plain clothing. Shirts should be monochromatic to keep from distracting attention from the child’s face. When photographing a group of children, try to get them dressed in similar colors to keep clothes from clashing and distracting from the children themselves. Suggest a color scheme or outfit: jeans and white shirts are classic. Khakis are more formal. You can try for color, maybe telling the children to dress in primary colors or all-American red, white, and blue.

Let kids be kids. A photo of a child posed like a miniature adult might be amusing, but it won’t be a real portrait in the sense that it won’t capture the magic and personality of the child.

It helps to know the children. If they are your kids or relatives, you probably know their favorite toys or their favorite blankets or clothes. Let them play with their toys. Let them dress the way they wish. The pictures will be candid and natural. They’ll feel more comfortable in front of the camera, and then they may be more receptive to instruction. On a related note, use telephoto lenses for close-up face and portrait shots. It will keep you from crowding them and possibly frightening them.
Vary your height. Try taking pictures from the child’s level. Try taking pictures from below – kids like feeling tall. Let the kid play at being a giant, and see what you get.

Children move. Try to capture this movement. Experiment with shutter speed. A slow shutter speed will blur the child, and a fast shutter speed will stop the movement in action. If a child is running or skateboarding, try panning. Panning is a method of keeping the subject in focus but letting the background streak in motion. To pan, hold the camera with your elbows against your chest for stability. As the child moves past you, follow with the camera, keeping the child in the same place in the frame. Use a slowish shutter speed, and don’t stop moving the camera when you click the shutter. Be prepared to use a lot of film while perfecting this technique. Another way to use running in photographs, especially when photographing a group of children, is to have the children run toward the camera and take several pictures in rapid succession (you will never be able to predict which picture will come out best).

Be aware of the background. Make sure nothing distracts from the child. At the same time, a photograph of a child at play can let the playroom fill the frame while still keeping the focus on the child.

When taking posed pictures of groups of children, try to make them relaxed and natural, even for formal portraits. Kids don’t naturally stand in a single-file line. Use different levels. Have one child kneel or sit on the ground. Have the kids sit on different levels of the stairs. Have the kids climb on each other for a more casual portrait – encourage them to make a pyramid or give piggyback rides. Keep the background simple to maintain focus on the kids.

As usual, be prepared to use a lot of film. Kids are unpredictable, and they make faces sometimes instead of smiling. Let them have fun, because if they have fun, your pictures will show that fun and life.

Once someone dives into the science of photography they begin to hear a lot of words, such as saturation, that can sound quite confusing. When used in the context of light, saturation doesn’t mean the same thing it normally does.

Most people are used to thinking of saturation as the result of absorbing liquid. A paper towel can quickly get saturated with water or a cotton with ether and so on. So when we normally think of something as being highly saturated we think of it as being very wet, or having absorbed a lot of something else.

In terms of color and light things work differently.

A beam of white light contains every color. Therefore, in terms of light, every color combined equals white. When an object appears to be white, it is because the object is reflecting every single color towards us. When an object appears to be the color red is actually absorbing every color except for the red, which it reflects. At the other extreme is an object that is black. This is absorbing all of the colors in the white light and reflecting none.

The term saturation comes into play when measuring the amount of color being reflected. If an object absorbs every color except blue, for instance, then that blue is considered to be highly saturated. If, however, the object absorbs some of the blue along with everything else, then the blue is less saturated.

When all of this is brought back to the context of photography it can be a little trickier; still, the same basic idea is applied. A photo with very dull colors is considered to have low saturation. Further, the more blacks and grays that appear in the photo, the less saturated it is.
Photographers who deal with film choose their film based partially on its level of saturation. Some film will have a high saturation while others a low. A photographer may choose to shoot a portrait with a low saturation so as to bring out the details in the subjects face. A landscape photographer may want a heavily saturated film because it punches up the colors and the finer details that get lost aren’t as important.

With digital cameras there tends to be a standard of setting a low saturation as a default. Most cameras will let you adjust that before you take the picture. People are more likely to play with the saturation of their digital pictures after the shot has been taken though. Doing so is easy with almost any photo editing software out there.

To get a better idea of what saturation levels actually do to a picture then open up your editing software and play with some of your shots. If you have a picture that has very bland coloring then increase the saturation and you may be surprised at the result. Have fun, but pay attention to what you’re doing. That way you’ll better understand what you’re doing.

Commanding Exposure

Most cameras in use today have a built-in light meter that examines the light reflected by the subject you're framing in the viewfinder. Understanding how this light meter reads the scene is crucial to making successful, well-exposed photographs the majority of the time you shoot.

The Average Dilemma

Your camera's light meter bases all of its exposure settings on 18% gray, an "average" tone somewhere in the middle between light and darkness. This is great for a majority of picture taking situations and is the reason the light meter is calibrated in this fashion. Understanding this gives you the ability to make an educated decision about whether to go with your camera's suggested exposure or to override it.

Watch out for the exceptions.

Subjects that are lighter or darker than "average" fool your camera and ultimately lead to exposure errors that can ruin even the most well composed photograph. Always consider the tone of your subject or it will come back to haunt you!

Exposure Strategies

Look for an average tone.

If you find an average tone that is in the same light as your subject, take a meter reading from it and lock that reading in your camera (read your camera's instruction manual for details on locking the exposure) then recompose the shot to include your subject. Fortunately for the outdoor photographer average tones abound: tree trunks, most rocks, green foliage and even most skin tones qualify.

Use a gray card.

Available at most camera stores, the gray card is just that, a card that is coated with a calibrated 18% gray tone often available in a variety of sizes. Take your meter reading off of this card but be sure that the card is in the same light as your subject. For obvious reasons, this is not always an option when photographing wildlife or other elusive subjects.

Use exposure compensation.

Most cameras have this feature which allows you to adjust the camera's built-in light meter reading. For subjects lighter than average "add"e; exposure by setting the dial to plus 1/2 or plus 1 stop (or more depending on the subject). Darker than average subjects require a minus setting (some cameras have a chart that goes from -2 stops to +2 stops with intervals of a 1/2 or 1/3 stop).
Bracket.

Extra insurance for tricky lighting situations and subjects. Bracketing your exposure means shooting over and under the exposure setting recommended by the camera (or the one you've set manually). This can be crucial when shooting slide film where even minor exposure errors can result in an unusable image.

Copyright © Justin W. Moore. All Rights Reserved.
m-toned, evenly lit subject requires no exposure compensation. This photograph was taken using the camera's built-in auto-exposure system.
300mm IS lens, 1/125 second at f4.0 (ISO 100)

Berenice Abbot

Born Berenice Abbot, on 17 July, 1898 in Ohio – it was not until the early 1920s that she changed her name to Berenice. It was architectural photography that has made her famous – photographically documenting the changing race of New York.

She moved to New York, in 1918, following friends there sharing accommodation with them in Greenwich Village – she did odds jobs and featured in some plays. She decided to study journalism at the University of Columbia but soon became disillusioned she and changed to sculpture. It was in Greenwich Village that she initially met Man Ray, who she later worked for as a dark room assistant, after meeting up with him in Paris after she had joined the exodus from New York, as the increase in commercialism warred against the idealism of the time, Berenice Abbot quickly learned from this absolute master of abstract style. He allowed her to use his studio to produce her own photographs.
In 1926, Berenice Abbot held her first one-woman exhibit at a small Parisian gallery. It was not long before her collection rivaled his and she set up her own studio and established herself as a portraitist of artists and intellectuals. She produced portraits of another great photographer, Eugene Atget, but unfortunately discovered that he had died before she could show him her work. She purchased his 1400 glass plate negatives and 7 800 prints with the aid of a few of her friends and put together many exhibitions to promote and publish his photographs and officially became the greatest advocate in maintaining the memory of his works. She eventually sold the Atget Collection to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1968.

In 1929, on a visit home Berenice Abbot noticed the changing architectural landscape of New York and decided to return home permanently to capture these changes. Many of her friends cautioned her not to leave the success she had achieved in Paris, however she was determined. Soon after her return, the stock market crashed. After struggling financially for some time, Fortune magazine hired her to take portraits of corporate executives.

It was during this period that she declared herself a documentary photographer. Berenice Abbot soon gained a reputation in New York and won support from a group of young Harvard alumni who patronized modern art. This support gave her a much needed break and she went on to exhibit her work at the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art in 1930 and then again in an exhibition 1932, at the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo. Four of her prints were selected for the Museum of the City of New York's inaugural exhibition in January 1932. The New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village offered her a position to teach the first photography course. During this period she met architectural historian Henry Russell Hitchcock and collaborated with him for an exhibition. He was a modernist and this joint venture helped to sharpen her eye for early American architecture.
It was during this period that she met Elizabeth McCausland, an art critic for the Springfield Republican. It became the turning point in her life - they became companions and partners. McCausland was an idealistic liberal and social activist.

Due to the prevailing economics times in 1935, Berenice Abbot was forced to apply to New York’s Emergency Relief fund which soon thereafter became the Federal Art Project (FAP), to aid her in her quest to photograph New York City. It was during this period that she produced some of her finest works and was the only photographer to be assigned staff. She photographed various aspects of New York life, which included “Material Aspects” being buildings and squares; “Means of Life” being transportation, communications and service; and then “People and How They Live” this section never came to full fruition.

Abbott exhibited 111 photographs at the Museum of the City of New York in 1939, and soon thereafter 97 of her works were published by E. P. Dutton & Co. in a guidebook produced for visitors to the New York World’s Fair. Shortly thereafter, Abbott was laid off by the FAP in September 1939. Berenice Abbott returned to photographically documenting New York City 1948, when she illustrated Greenwich Village Today and Yesterday (1949). In 1954 she was commissioned to photographed waterfront sites for a project called Metropolis: Old and New. Unfortunately these works were never published and only a handful of the photographs exist. Abbott contributed to developing new techniques and equipment of photography and received several honorary doctorates. In her later career, she took to photographing science despite her lack of knowledge and founds ways to visualize scientific phenomena such as kinetic energy, electricity and gravity.

Berenice Abbott died in retirement in Monson, Maine in 1991. She had been living in rural Maine since 1965.