Tips for Photographing Children

Rhonda over at Photography Hack (a new site to me - Thanks Darren!) shares a great series of tips for photographing kids.

My first paid work as a photographer was taking photos of children - on Santa's lap, one Christmas a few years back. Very much a cookie-Cutter type operation, there wasn't a lot of time for subtlety - get them up there, take a couple of (hopefully well-timed) shots while they're talking to Santa, then onto the next one. Of course, this was long enough ago that I was shooting on film, so I had to try and get the best shot I could, with no chance to do-over, or review.

The one thing I took from that, the one thing I think I did really well, was to try and talk to the child directly before they went up to Santa - use those few seconds to try and build the tiniest of relationships, enough to get the child to look up in my direction, and hopefully not look too scared. Once in a while it *really* paid off - there were a few photos that turned out absolutely brilliantly. Most of the time it worked sort-of-OK, and some of the time it failed miserably. But still. Lesson learned.

[Via DigitalPhotographyBlog]

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