I thought that my catch your attention! Seriously though I wanted to share a couple of tips that are specific to photographing toddlers. They are a different breed of portraits to say the least. Expect more action than an MMA fight! Here are five of my tips.
Keep them at a distance – This is an easy one. shoot with a longer lens. If you are up close to a baby, most likely you will catch your attention. When something gets their attention, bam! they will pounce on it. If you are wearing glasses, they will swipe them off your face and leave you with barely enough time to blink. So if you get up close to them with a wide lens, prepare for tiny finger prints across your glass. Honestly that isn’t a big deal, but if you want to grab more images that don’t look like a paparazzi ambush, try a longer lens and zoom in. it will give you a little breathing room and maybe they will be a little more candid if you are not in their space.
Flexible Flash – Toddlers move and they move fast. If there is anything you take from this article that would be the most important. In fact that is what most of these are based on. If you intend to use flash on a child’s session it has to move fast too. I am writing this from the perspective of not using an assistant. So the way I deal with this is using mini pocket wizard and a flex TT5, from pocket wizard. Then I put on the little foot shoe that comes with the flash. This way the flash can stand on its own. That way I can dive into action and stand the flash up at my discretion. I also use a Gary Fong diffuser. With this set up I can literally dive onto the ground, offset my flash at about 45 degrees and start firing at my subject. Big lighting setups will fail, because a toddler will be up and gone before you open your umbrella.
Go to their happy place – You want the children to be happy and comfortable, that way there is a great chance that they will flash that million dollar smile for you more often. Talk to the parents, do they take the children to the park down the street every day? If they do that is a great place to shoot. Get this information early, so you can scout out the location before hand. You don’t want to be looking for place to shoot with the client there. If you notice something you didn’t during scouting that’s OK, shoot it, but now what the battle ground will be before you get there.
AI servo mode – Set your camera focus to AI servo mode. Children move fast and you want to catch the action, especially when you are firing off your fully automatic weapon..er, I mean camera. It is great catching toddlers running towards you or towards mom. Lock focus on their eyes and let the camera track it. It won’t get every photo from the sequence, but you are guaranteed to get some keepers.
Get to their level – The most important tip for shooting toddlers is getting to their level. You want to capture their world, to do that you have to be in their world. That means getting down and shooting at their eye level or lower! Bonus tip- make sure you have the correct fatigues for the job. If you will be shooting out side and you need to dive down on the ground to get a photo, well you can’t be thinking about ruining your best dress slacks. This is not a wedding, you need to be professional looking but you need to be able get into the field of combat. Crawl on your stomach like a soldier to get those shots.