Enter A Cute Baby Photo Contest For Fun To Improve Your Photography Skills
Now summer is definitely over and the leaves are turning, our kids are back at school and there seem to be fewer opportunities for taking photographs of our children. All the vacation snaps are a distant memory; we’ve shared them with our family, perhaps had a few prints made. But fall shouldn’t mean putting our cameras away until the holiday season gears us up again. Babies and children grow so quickly that a couple of months can make a big gap in our photo albums. To give you a motivation to keep photographing your kids, why not commit to entering a cute baby photo contest every month.
Cute baby and kid photo contests are usually free to enter and offer all sorts of prizes and opportunities. The biggest ones are used by talent scouts to find new child models for advertising campaigns and movies. But you don’t need to have an ambition for your child to be the next Dakota Fanning to enter a photo contest. Enter just for fun, as a reason to take plenty of photos of your baby and improve your photography skills.
When you start looking at the winning entries from past months you will start to get a feel of the elements of a successful child portrait. Of course the cuteness of the child does play a part, but the difference between a winning photo and an also ran will usually lie in the photography rather than the model. Look at how the light falls on the child’s face; is it harsh sunlight that makes the child screw their eyes up? Probably not; winning photos usually have soft reflected light that makes the child’s skin look luminous but doesn’t cast dark shadows.
See if you can recreate those lighting conditions yourself. If your children are willing models, get them to move around; position them, one at a time in different places around your home and garden. Try photographing them with their back to the sunlight; take photos on a rainy day; stand them side on to a white wall that reflects light back on them; photograph them inside, standing beside a big window that lets in lots of indirect light. Take several pictures in each different place and note down where you took each set of pictures and at which time of day. Then look at them all on your computer. Maybe you will have caught a brilliant picture already, but if you haven’t, look at each photo and see which places have the best light.
Next time you and your child feel like a photo session, return to those places and take loads more photos until you have caught a winning expression on your child’s face in gorgeous, soft light, which may well get you into the finals of a cute kid photo contest.
Mum and Photographer
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