Five Tips To Capture Emotion In Photographing Children With Dogs

May 17, 2012

1. Pick a child and a dog who are familiar with each other.

Photographing children with dogs should be easy for you if you are a parent or a grand parent and your child has a dog for a pet, or the family pet is a dog.  If the weather is nice, you can take them outdoors later in the afternoon for the best lighting situation. In the above picture, Jennifer chose to sit on the swing and was in the shade with her Jack Russel Terrier “Harley”.  The rule for the shade is: If the subject is in the shade, then you and your camera should be in the shade also. This is to help the camera meter the light properly for the correct exposure. Standing way out in the sun and using a longer lens will make things very difficult for you if your child is in the shade.

2. Pick a camera that you are familiar with and very comfortable.

If you have children, don’t be one of those parents who seldom uses their camera, because then your camera won’t be your friend when you really need it to perform for you.  You won’t understand what the settings are telling you, and when you start to “just make changes” you’ll get even more frustrated.  So, invest in your ability to create photographic art with your child, and read that camera manual.  Then you can make a cheat card with all of your hand picked places to start settings on it, and when things get confusing for you, you can just put everything back to normal, relax, take a deep breath, and start again, but this time more slowly and think about what change you should make and why you would make it.

Next, I would tell you to just practice, and practice some more using your camera until you know what the settings do like you know the back of your hand.

3. Wait to see how the dog and the child interact naturally with each other.

After you have evaluated the lighting situation, and considered motion for your images, become aware of what’s going on around you with both the kids and the pet dog. To put kids at ease, I first try to photograph whatever they have chosen to do, even if it’s silly. They may even ask you to take a picture of them doing something that they want you to photograph.  Doing that will help to build their trust with you, and then they will really feel comfortable with you taking pictures around them because they now consider it a “team” effort. If you feel you need a little more help here, you can read up on Seven Tips for Interacting with Kids. Preteens and teenagers get embarrassed very easily at just about anything, so don’t act pressured, because they will sense that; you want them to just act natural for the most part. Soon enough the kids will start to relax, and then you can give some gentle direction to them for posing for a few very special photos just like the one above with Jennifer and her dog, “Harley” where all the emotion you could ever want has been captured!

4. Do some “test” photos with your camera to get it set up for the correct lighting and the movement you are encountering.

This is another reason why you can just take a few practice pictures to start with.  You will most likely have to tweak your settings to be just right.  I always have my camera set up with the histogram showing on the back display along with the image I have just taken. That way I can make sure the information my histogram is showing is in the middle of the graph, and not way off to one side or the other which would indicate over or under exposure.  This is where you may want to read one of my other posts on the use of a 35mm slr camera to gain a better understanding in how to tweak your camera settings.  It’s not very difficult, trust me; it just takes a little effort to get it, and once you do it will be like riding a bike, you’ll never forget how.

5. Get ready to work hard for about 30 minutes.

Now, this is where the fun starts! The kids will most likely be on the move, and you will need to be mobile too, because you need to place yourself in the best position to frame the image.  Think about things like: How much of their face is showing if this is a side view, is the sunlight causing them to squint, do I need to use fill flash so that the faces aren’t in deep shadow, is my shutter speed fast enough for their movements, can I frame this picture using the 3:1 artists ratio, would they be upset if I exchanged a pretty prop for an awful one???  etc. etc. In these last pictures of Jennifer teaching Piper to handle the dog leash, Harley and Piper kept insisting on playing with an awful old play/chew ball they they had found in the woods from our Golden Retriever dog “Shadow” who died in 2008.  So, rather than upset a toddler and a dog, I just let the ball be, and continued taking pictures until I got some without that old ball.

 

Please share “Five Tips To Capture Emotion In Photographing Children With Dogs” with your friends using the buttons below. Thanks!

 

Remember, keep taking lots and lots of photographs of your kids. You will be glad you did!

ps: Don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter “Real Kids Photography” here!

If you enjoyed this article please subscribe to my RSS Feed here and get future articles sent right to you!

Work With Low Depth Of Field For Stunning Toddler Photos

May 10, 2012

Many parents and grand parents are not even aware that the pictures that they are taking of their toddlers can go from a “great” picture to an absolutely “stunning” picture by just learning to work with low depth of field when they are photographing the little ones!  Sometimes this is also called shallow depth of field.

You Don’t Need To “Tidy Up The Background” To Get Depth In Photography

The good news is that you don’t have to worry about having a perfect background for these pictures, because it is going to be very much out-of-focus (this is called background blur), and for the most part the background will not matter.  The bad news is that this is going to be a real challenge for you because the little ones are always on the move which makes your ability to focus critical (even when using auto focus on your camera).  All you will need is for them to be well, not ill, rested, and have something for them to be curious about.  Then your photo opportunities will abound.

Take your toddler outside for starters, later in the day (about 4 or 5 pm) and set your camera up for aperture priority with an ability to have your flash fire.  The first few pictures will have to be for practice until you can get the exposure right for the lighting.  The day I took these pictures of Piper, it was a cloudy bright day, and the activity was intense as there was a Jack Russel terrier (a little dog) running frantically around too!

If you are using a point and shoot camera such as a Nikon COOLPIX and can not select the “aperture priority” mode, you should set up your camera for the “Portrait” mode and use the face priority AF (auto-focus). Make sure that your flash is set to “on.” However, my other grand daughter has a Nikon Cool Pix camera, and when I was working with her using her camera a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the face priority AF was not, in my opinion, very easy to work with. It was a challenge to get the focus to “lock on” when you thought that you had the best expression in a picture. (more…)

How & Where To Choose A Leather Photo Album

May 4, 2012

Some of the most attractive and safest photo albums are a leather photo album that consists of acid free archival material in both the album cover and the album pages.  This post is the last in a series that I have written on the best and safest ways to store your precious images of your children and grand children.  For either a refresher or a complete understanding of this subject, you may want to reference these two previous posts by clicking on these titles:

1. How To Store Pictures Of Your Children
2. Do You Need A Photobox To Store Your Pictures?

Although photo storage may not be as exciting a subject as those in some of my other posts, this information is still is very important to fulfilling the complete picture of enjoying your personal photography involvement with your children.

When I was a young girl, many times we would go to my grand parents for a Sunday dinner  which almost always consisted of my Grandma’s fried chicken, homemade biscuits, gravy, mashed potatoes, cranberry jello relish, and her own homemade chicken noodles.  I even remember her rolling out the egg noodles in her country kitchen and then hanging them on a linen towel over the back of a kitchen chair to dry the Saturday before.  And to top it off, she raised the chickens and the eggs, and the potatoes had been grown in her garden.  Any milk came from their cows; not much was store bought in those days.  I sometimes think that kids today are missing a lot by not seeing all of this happen. (more…)

Toddler Photography Ideas. . .Take A Closer Look At “Bad” Pictures

April 25, 2012

What If I Make Mistakes?. . .Can I Do Anything With These Pictures?

In my last blog post, I discussed photographing toddlers and some toddler photography ideas.  Every time I photograph a toddler, it renews my respect for the energy level they display on a continuous basis right up until the second they are “out like a light” in sleep!

When I was photographing Piper, our little two year old toddler grand daughter, believe it or not, I made some mistakes. Of course, we all want to take all perfect pictures every time. Right?  I know that I want to, but it never happens, because there is just too much going on all at once.

In the picture on the left, I could not get a full side view of Piper, because she kept her back to me while she was playing with her mommy. Here, I did capture her with one of her eyes showing, but in my attempt to be quick enough on the focus to her eye, I did not get the exposure right for this picture.  Some times the exposure is just too far off for me to call the photo worth while, and I delete it.  Here, however, I could work with it in Photoshop, because I took the picture in the RAW. Photoshop allows me to modify the exposure to some degree in the computer, and the picture to the above left is the result of this modification in my computer.  Did you notice that this is one of the really important toddler photography ideas: Take your pictures in the RAW format if you want more flexibility with them.
(more…)

Toddler Photography Can Be An Adventure!

April 19, 2012

Photographing Toddlers is almost always a challenge!

Toddler photography is one of the most challenging kinds of kids photography. The best toddler photography ideas that I can give you for “How To Photograph Toddlers” is just this: Have your camera ready to go and use it to photograph them.

This past weekend, our daughter brought our little two year old grand daughter over to visit for a while; she was coming to pick up a Little Tykes car and a plastic combination picnic table and rocker (like a teeter totter with seats) for her to play with a friend, from us.

Since we hadn’t seen Piper much since my husband’s knee replacement surgery, I thought that I would try to get some new pictures of her.  Well, as I expected, she had changed again from the last time that we saw her; now she was moving faster than lightening does!

(more…)

Next Page »

• 
  
  

• Categoires

  Select Category Child Photography  (140) Child Photography Podcasts  (1) Display Your Photographs  (52) How To Photograph Children  (43) Kids Photo Contest  (13) Photography Tips  (66) Preserve Your Photographs  (23) Share Your Photographs  (45) Starter Digital Cameras  (29) Uncategorized  (21)

Name: Email: