 Getting down to their level invites you into the kid's world. I’m always pleased if you hire me to photograph your children, but most people don’t live in Santa Fe or Albuquerque, and based on the ‘teach a man to fish’ theory I’m keen to share what I’ve learned with as many people as possible
I think everyone can take better pictures of their kids, regardless of the camera they have or their experience.
So here is the first in a series of tips for taking better photographs of children.
None of these first tips require adjusting your camera’s settings in any way except zooming in and out.
I’ll get to more technical tips later, but often the biggest improvements come from taking a more thoughtful approach to what you’re photographing.
And that won’t cost you a penny in new gear.
1) What are you trying to say?
As the photographer and writer David du Chemin points out, a good photograph isn’t just a picture of something, it’s a picture about something. This might sound like splitting hairs, but bearing this in mind is the single biggest thing that will improve your photographs. You can have all the technical craft in the world, unless you know what you’re trying to capture and communicate then your photos won’t have much to say.
Which is why I don’t like formally posed shots very much because arranging people in a pattern and making them smile often only says ‘they made us smile, and look how awkward we are’.
You know your own children better than anyone. What is it about them that you find fascinating or that melts your heart? What is it in their character makes them you, and how do you feel about that? It could be as simple as wanting to show how beautiful you think they are, or how funny. Or you might love the serious concentration they devote to their painting. Whatever it is, that’s a good place to start. Imagine you were a photojournalist given the job of producing a set of images that showed some key aspects of your child – what are the activities, moods or emotions you’d like to communicate?
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Here in Santa Fe, the snow’s finally melting (most of it off our roof and into our spare room, but anyway) and today was the first time that my daughter and I could hang out under the portal outside our living room without gloves, hats and snowboots.
I’ve been busy with web work recently, for which I’m grateful, but I’ve not been shooting as much as I should. So the camera’s been sitting there reproachfully, but today I grabbed it when we went outside.
And of course, it was taking photos of my daughter that got me excited about photography again so chatting away to her while I took some shots was nicely revivifying (which is hard to spell, but I think that’s the word I want).
I ran this shot through one of Aperture 3’s cross-processing presets for extra contrasty and saturated goodness. Now that Apple have released version 3.0.1, Aperture seems stable enough that you can actually use it without worrying about crashes all the time, and its new features are impressive.
UPDATE MARCH 2010: the release of the Aperture 3.0.1 update seems to have fixed many of the reliability problems. I’m back running in 64-bit mode with Faces working, and things haven’t crashed horribly for a while. YMMV.
After a long wait for the release of Aperture 3, I ignored my own rule about waiting until the first incremental update of new software before installing it. Big mistake.
Upgrading my 20,000 image library meant I fell foul of the apparent memory leak problem that seems to beset the new version.
First I was told I hadn’t enough room on my HD to complete the update – it had filled the spare 35GB on my MacBook Pro internal drive with a giant swap file.
Then the whole machine would hang while Aperture 3 performed some mystery ‘processing’ work on my images. I had no idea if my library was intact, and no way of actually using the product for real work.
The Fix – sort of
Thanks to the useful advice from fellow sufferers on the Apple Aperture Support forums, I binned my first attempt, and cobbled together a solution. I’ve no idea if these will work for you, and hopefully there’ll be an update along soon that will help us all out, but here’s what got me working again.
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 Sometimes the younger generation seem to get a handle on all this more quickly
As a photographer, Apple Aperture consultant and web designer for photographers, I spend a lot of time helping other pros.
Recently three episodes have shown me how drastically the photography business is changing, and what range of skills are required to run a successful photography business.
Episode 1 – “Wordpress is hard”
I’d just finished a site for a client and had carried out a training session on how to use Wordpress to keep the site up to date. The next day I got a call from the flustered photog who had spent the afternoon trying to add one article. ‘This is much harder than I thought it was going to be,’ he explained.
I have some sympathy – for people who’ve never spent any time around a website before, the admin panel and functionality of a content management system takes a little getting used to. But part of his difficulty was that he lacked even basic web skills such as knowing how to copy a link from the address bar of a browser and paste it in somewhere else. This lack of familiarity with what are for many everyday habits made everything else much harder.
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 For my first thirty years I was the writing guy: good at English in school and college, Masters in Literature, and a working journalist for The Irish Times and other publications in Ireland, the US and UK. And I’m the author of a a book of travel literature (that doesn’t have any photographs in it).
Even my entrance into the world of technology came because I could write – in this case, training materials teaching people how to use Microsoft products (God help me).
This might seem like a lot of wasted time, or at best lots of irrelevant experience.
But since I’ve been pursuing photography more seriously over the last four or five years, I’ve come to see that a lot of the things I learned writing have been very useful when I have a camera in my hand. (more…)
Christmas Eve might already seem a long way away as we head into mid-January, but I’ve just had a chance to look through some of the pictures I took around Canyon Road that cold night a few weeks ago.
It’s a Santa Fe Christmas Eve tradition to light farolitos – nothing more than a night light in a brown paper bag weighed down with sand – and the area around Canyon Road hosts thousands of them, and hundreds who bundle up to come out to see them.
There’s a beautiful simplicity to them, especially if there’s snow on the ground. So here’s a blast of good cheer for you.
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Before 2009 disappears entirely from memory, there’s just time for me to follow up my pick of my 2009 personal work with these favourites from my work for my fantastic clients.
I was lucky enough to meet some great children (and their parents) over the year, and we ended up with some lovely images.
Here’s to a great 2010 to all of you.
Happy Holidays, everyone.
With the end of the year fast approaching, I’ve put together a baker’s dozen of my favourite personal photos from the year. I’ll do a similar list of favourites from my client shoots in the next few days.
So here they are, from scraped knees to Our Lady, from rainbows to foggy Mazatlan. And I hope you all have a peaceful and warm holiday period.
Just a quick update on my whereabouts: back in Santa Fe after a Thanksgiving trip to San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Above (and below) are shots from the California Academy of Sciences – a great place to visit with kids of all sorts of ages.
We stopped in at the beach in Half Moon Bay, too (as you can see), but for some reason I didn’t get too many shots of San Francisco itself. Go figure.
If you’re taking pictures of boys, you have to move fast. The brothers I did a portrait shoot of recently in White Rock were no exception – aged nearly five and seven, they were chasing around like mad, clambering over boulders and not very interested in me at all.
Which is how I like it. We’d chosen the crags at White Rock as their family likes to climb, and giving the boys space to be themselves seemed a much better idea than cramming them into smart clothes and a studio.
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Sorting through the images from the Open House day at Tumbledown Gymnastics studio yesterday. Had a great day, and here are some sneak peeks.
  
Tomorrow starts a week of shoots at Tumbledown Gymnastics Studio, and in preparation for shooting in pretty dodgy light, I ordered a little something from nice folks at borrowlenses.com – the Canon 135mm f/2 L lens.
To check it out, I accompanied my long-suffering daughter on her exploration of the arroyo beside our house, and grabbed some images.
This is far from a full review, but I really like it. It’s pretty small (at least on a 5D) and unintimidating (although the hood is a chunky addition), which helps in certain situations.
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John Naughton retells a moving story on his blog concerning the death of Austro-British writer, wit, restauateur, politician and broadcaster Sir Clement Freud, told by his daughter Emma:
He had, she said, “a perfect death”. On the day in question, he’d been to the races (at Exeter), had won on the horses, had a good lunch with his “second best friend” (apparently he was punctilious about ranking his friendships), and was writing his column (about the Exeter meeting) for a racing newspaper when he dropped dead in mid-sentence. The next day, Emma and her Mum woke up his computer and found that the last words he’d written were “In God’s good time…”.
Like many an impatient Aperture user, I recently took the Lightroom 3 Beta for a spin. What follows is an informal review of my experience of Lightroom 3 Beta as a long-time Aperture user, and Apple Certified Pro in Aperture.
I mainly looked at the adjustment settings rather than the organizing or exporting options.
I hadn’t looked closely at Lightroom 2, so many of the things I liked about Adobe’s product were probably there in the earlier version too.
My overall view is that Lightroom includes some very valuable adjustment features that Aperture 2 gets nowhere near. The rumoured arrival of Aperture X (the rebranded Aperture 3) means I’m not making any snap decisions, but the revised Aperture needs at least to match Lightroom’s strengths to stay competitive.
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