A few tips on portait photography
Following are some general suggestions and guidelines which you may find helpful. We feel that if you take these points into consideration, you'll be far happier with your photographs and the final printed photo cards.
The information below is not intended to be strictly accurate from a technical standpoint since that is outside the scope of the topic.
More information to follow as we build out this lens. Please feel free to offer additional suggestion, tips and resources.
Table of Contents
Baby Photography
Observations & Suggestions
As a new parent, catching the perfect pose is as much about luck as it is about planning. The good news? There are a lot of things that you can do to help your odds without a lot of effort.
First of all, the auto-focus feature on your camera uses contrast not distance to focus. This is why you can shoot through glass at distant objects.
Secondly, in poor lighting, your camera may have difficulty finding focus or focus on an unintended area. For example, a sleeping baby's face has little contrast which can confuse a camera. This is why you might have a well focused blanket but a blurry baby in your photographs.
Thirdly, poor lighting includes most indoor photography, even in seemingly well lit rooms.
While I will go into more detail at a later date, remember that the importance of focus accuracy increases as light decreases.
If you keep these issues in mind, you can see why light becomes one of the most important aspects of good baby photography. The same rules apply for many other types of photography, however. Our Tiny Prints website also has many effective tips with examples which may be helpful as well.
You Need Light!
Good light provides a faster shutter speed for the camera. The faster the shutter speed, the more the movement will be frozen and "camera shake" will be minimized. In low lighting, your camera will attempt to speed up the shutter by adjusting settings which will likely degrade the quality of your photo. Keep in mind, anything but a very well lit room would be considered low lighting.
The camera will likely take the following steps to speed up the shutter:
The camera will open the aperture (AKA f/stop) - this will let more light through the lens but will also require much more accurate focusing. The area achieving sharp focus may be very narrow, i.e. tip of nose is sharp, eyes out of focus. The term is called "depth of field."
The camera may also increase the ISO* - a higher ISO will allow for faster shutter speeds but can severely degrade the quality of the photo. For best results with "point & shoot" type cameras, keep the ISO at 200** or below. Digital SLR cameras will be much more tolerant in this regard, often being able to shoot in excess of 800 ISO with acceptable results.
The camera may turn on the flash - the flash is your friend, but automatic settings will often create harsh shadows or over-exposed areas if too close to your subject.
*ISO stands for International Standards Organization and is essentially a measurement of light sensitivity.
**Higher ISOs settings may be required under extreme low light situations such as parties and events where shutter speed needs to be maximized. In these cases, the additional sharpness may trump any graininess. We don't recommend high ISOs in baby photography because the skin tone can be severely degraded.
If manual settings are overwhelming, you will have a huge increase in your photo success rate if you just focus on providing as much diffused ambient light as possible.
Our Tiny Prints website also has many effective people photography tips with examples which may be helpful as well.
Online Photo Sharing Sites
Saving your photographs online so they can be easily shared with friends and family are very popular right now. Many offer the additional features such as printing options, photo editing and web photo albums.
We have found that many of these services only provide a very low resolution sample of the photo, unsuitable for printing when the photos are shared. As such, we receive many photos uploaded to our personalized cards which look fine on a computer monitor but will likely not print to satisfaction on paper. As such, we HIGHLY recommend sending us the original photo as it came from the camera. Our designers can make slight photo edits and may be able to remove red-eye and date stamps. In addition, our online editing tool can change your photos to sepia or black & white so there is no need to do it ahead of time.
Additionally, to help move photos that have already been saved online, we have recently partnered with Flickr, Picasa and SmugMug so you can send photos directly from your online album to your personalized photo card. Zenfolio is also a top choice because they allow downloading of full resolution copies of images in your online photo album.
A Few Notes About Professional Photographers
Many people hire professional photographers to take pictures of their family and children. Clearly, the level of photographic quality will be at a level few of us can aspire and the resulting cards will be very memorable.
Things to keep in mind. The photographer will likely provide the digital photos following the shoot for you to review and help decide which you want to purchase. More than likely, these samples are low resolution copies of the original photograph. They will look great on your monitor however, which will be deceiving because they are not of print quality. This is to ensure that they are paid for the photos you choose.
Once the photos have been purchased, the photographer may or may not provide a digital copy. This largely depends on whether you have purchased an individual photograph or complete rights to the photograph. See your photographer for a complete and detailed explanation.
We frequently see photos uploaded to us from the sample CD from professional photographers. If we suspect that to be the case, we contact our customers to see if they can provide the original or full resolution version. This can be very frustrating for people because there is the assumption that anything from a professional photographer will be of greater quality, not lesser.
Find Some Catch Light
A natural light source is the easiest way to achieve catch light in your photos but there are others. I will often set up my subject facing a large window that receives indirect sunlight and then get between them and the window. The light from the window will illuminate the face without causing squinting and will avoid harsh shadows, provide that extra sparkle that sets the photo apart.
An easy alternative would be to use the flash on your camera. Even in a well lit room, a flash may be surprisingly helpful. By turning down the power of the flash using the manual setting of the camera, you can create catch light and eliminate some shadows at the same time. If you have ventured into the realm of the external flash, you can really get creative; many have a bounce and/or swivel feature that allows you to aim the flash away from your subject. This allows the light to bounce and scatter throughout the room, creating a more natural effect.
I hope you have found some of this information useful. We really enjoy seeing your baby pictures improve with practice and technique!
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