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?

Kids don’t fake it well, but they’ll try if you ask them, or they’ve got their ‘photo smile’ they’re used to rolling out when a camera appears. You’ve got to get past that and let them get comfortable and/or distracted by something else before you’ll have the chance to capture something more meaningful.

Of course, even though you’re taking a picture of them, you’re also saying something about you if it’s an image with some intention behind it. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it might be something you hadn’t thought much about. Even if you’re just reacting to what you see in front of you and shooting spontaneously (sometimes especially because of that), what you choose to shoot and what makes you press the shutter at that instant and not another can show a lot about you.

This might not be the most practical bit of advice, but all I’m suggesting is that you ask yourself ‘what is this picture about?’ as well as ‘what is this a picture of?’.

2) Go low or high

Shooting from above lends a vulnerable air.

If you stand up and shoot from your normal height, you’ll get a bunch of shots with a slightly unflattering angle and no real energy to them.

They’ll look like the way you see your child most of the time.

So I recommend getting down to their level.

That might mean scuffing the knees of your trousers, but it’s worth it as it gives you a clearer and more immediate way in to their world.

One exception to this is a shot where you stand right over the boy or girl and get them to look up at you.

This lends the kid a vulnerable air and can look very sweet.

The other exception is to get below them – easiest when they’re climbing on stuff in a playground.

Even if they’re not very high off the ground, if you squat down so they’re above you, include lots of sky and no ground, and you’ve given your little adventurer a more heroic look.

Either way, don’t just stand there and shoot.

3) Get in tight

Figure out what’s the most important thing in the picture, and fill the frame with that.

That sounds obvious, but when we look at things with our eyes we tend to filter out the periphery without really thinking about it. The same goes with looking through a viewfinder or a screen on the back of a camera.

Cutting out the clutter simplifies and strengthens this image.

If you’re only looking at the most important thing, you might not notice at the time that there’s a bunch of other stuff in the frame. But you will notice when you look at the image later. So get into the habit of checking what else you’re including in the frame before you press the shutter.

If you don’t need the material to show some context, zoom in to the important thing (often a face) to cut out the clutter. This can be zooming with your camera, or if you’re using a prime lens (one that doesn’t have a zoom), you’ll have to ‘zoom with your feet’ aka walk in closer.

Some of the time you can do this in the camera, and get a perfectly composed image straight off. But I’m not that good, especially if I’m chasing after a child, so cropping (and some of the other adjustments you see) can obviously be done after the fact, too.

4) Don’t leave much headroom

If you’re taking a photo of a single child, it might seem most natural to put the kid’s face in the middle of the frame. Many cameras’ autofocus feature encourages this, as you put the thing you want to focus on in the middle of the frame, then press the shutter half way down to focus.

If you take a picture like that, you’ll obviously get a lot of background in the space above the child’s head. And because the face only comes halfway up the frame, it won’t be very large.

But (related to the get in tight point above) there’s something much more satisfactory about having the top of the head near the top of the frame. The face is larger, there’s less distraction above the head and it looks like you meant it. The easiest way I can tell the difference between someone who’s just taking snapshots and someone’s who’s thinking about what they’re doing is that there’s no room above people’s heads in the photos they take.

5) ‘The centre is for God’

So you’ve got the top of the head near the top of the frame. But the kid still has an equal amount of space on either side of them. Sometimes this works, if its a powerful symmetry you’re after.

Most of the time however a better option is to recompose the shot so the key element is on one side or the other. As photography teachers say, ‘the centre is for God’.

How do you decide? If the subject is looking in one direction then giving them more room to look into often feels better. The same with motion – if someone’s moving across the frame, then space ahead of them to move into lends the scene some dynamism. Sometimes the more practical matter of cutting out something distracting will dictate which side the subject be.

This ties into the famous ‘rule of thirds’ you’ve probably heard of. Simply put, it’s more visually dynamic to align key elements in your image along imaginary divisions of the frame into three horizontal and three vertical areas. Placing things at the intersection of these lines is particularly strong.

The first shot is OK, but the boy is right in the middle of the frame with a bunch of room above his head. Some cropping tightens things much more satisfactorily.

6) The part for the whole

Sometimes parts of a subject are all that’s needed to communicate something more clearly than the whole.

We’ve also seen those baby portraits of just the soles of a new-born’s feet – a detail that shows the vulnerability and delicacy of the new life.

So look for telling details rather than trying to show the whole scene.

The details might be hands working on something for example, or maybe you leave out the child entirely and show a little of what they’ve been up to.

7) Landscape or portrait?

In other words should you keep the camera horizontal, or turn it through 90 degrees so it’s vertical. A non-committal ‘it depends’ on this one. A head and shoulders shot fits more naturally into vertical frame – it’s not called ‘portrait’ for nothing – but even for this type of image there are occasions when you’d want to break this rule.

For example, if there’s a gorgeous background behind the kid, you might want to show more of that, or taking a  shot of a kid sitting on a bench in horizontal alignment would communicate their small size. The long horizontal of the bench emphasised by the horizontal alignment, and contrasting with the smaller vertical form of the kid. (And you’d put the kid over to one side of the bench, right?).

I’ll be writing more tutorial posts like this in the future, so feel free to let me know (in the comments or via email) if there’s particular problems you’re having, or questions you’d like answered.

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.

1) Switched to 32-bit mode.
This should be as easy as checking the box in the Get Info pane, but along with a lot of folks, that box didn’t appear for me until I’d booted the machine in Safe Mode, and then restarted in normal mode again.

It seems users who got a boxed version (like me) were more likely not to see the 32-bit mode checkbox

2) Created a new library

3) Switched off Faces
Under Preferences, there’s an option to disable this. The heavy processing required to scan all the faces in a large library can lead to runaway memory problems.

4) Restored from an Aperture 2 vault
Since my main library had been banjaxed by my first attempt, I went with restoring from a vault. Which is yet another reason why having at least 2 extra copies of your libraries (with one at an offsite location) is a good idea.

Aperture 3 told me it would have to update the vault because it was from an older version, and it took a long time, but everything came in properly.

Other options

Other folks seem to have enjoyed success deleting previews, recreating thumbnails and rebuilding the database of their version 2 library before updating.

And others still have exported projects one at a time, and imported them into a new Aperture 3 library.

And finally, there have been people (probably the silent majority) who have had no trouble at all.

Macworld has some troubleshooting tips, with useful links to follow for particular symptoms.

But it’s unacceptable that a product on which so many people rely on for their livelihoods was released with this kind of problem in it.

The Green/Magenta box issue

As well as the memory leak – new in Aperture 3 – there’s an old problem that’s been afflicting some Aperture 2 users who were using Snow Leopard that hasn’t been fixed.

When making adjustments, some or all of your image suddenly turns into a crazy geometric patchwork of green or magenta lines and blocks.

This too is well known on the support forum, but there’s yet to be a solution.

Spoiling the ship for a ha’peth of tar

There are lots of great new features in Aperture 3 – including the crucial issues of non-destructive local adjustments, and comprehensive presets that I talked about in my comparison of Aperture 2 and the Lightroom 3 beta.

But it’s a shame that the first thing most people are going to hear about the new version is how flaky and unusable it is.

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.

If you run a large studio where you can employ someone to do website updates for you, maybe that’s not such a big deal. But if you’re a single-person operation like so many photographers this lack of comfort with the internet is a big handicap.

Episode 2 – “I don’t want to spend more time in front of the computer”

Another week, another training session for a photography client. This time we were talking through the functionality that Photoshelter offers, and its system of Archives and Galleries. As I explained how to upload images I could see I was losing the guy. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’ve been thinking that maybe I’ll make a change to something completely different. I don’t want to spend any more time in front of a computer.’

It wasn’t just the prospect of uploading images that made him think of a career change – he admitted being ambivalent about the website project as a whole in the face of declining stock income, so I asked him what he thought he’d be doing instead.

‘More teaching, workshops, you know’. This isn’t a bad idea but it too will probably require web skills and a commitment to be an active participant online. In the same way as you won’t escape book-keeping by opening another business, you won’t escape the computer by moving from being a shooter to a teacher.

Episode 3 – “This sort of thing is just not my thing”

Later in the week I got a call from another photographer I’d done a small amount of web work and some Aperture consulting for. The photog’s Aperture library had been on his computer’s hard drive, and he was running out of room. And he didn’t have it backed up. I’d moved the library to an external drive, set up another drive as a backup vault for him and talked him through the pros and cons of off-site and online backup strategies.

But that was a while ago and now he was having some more trouble. Turned out he had unearthed an earlier version of Aperture on his machine I hadn’t know about and had created a new library in the old version of the application and his photos were split across the old new library and the new old library.

‘This sort of thing is just not my thing’, explained the photographer. Again, if he had someone in the office to worry about this, maybe this would be OK, but he doesn’t, so it’s not. Being able to find your work instantly, and being comfortable that it’s securely backed up is crucial, whether it’s your thing or not.

The Architects analogy

My wife is an architect, and when she went to architecture school, they all still drew their sets of plans by hand. But early in her professional career, AutoCAD arrived and even though she’d not learned it in college, she knew she had to jump into this because this was now what architects needed to do.

Some people her age and older jumped with her, but others didn’t. So now they need to pay people to work on their sets for them, and they never learned even how to make changes themselves. They’re at a tremendous disadvantage.

For photographers, people thought that moving from film to digital was the big shift that pro photographers would have to adjust to in their careers – the equivalent of the architects’ move from drawing on paper to AutoCAD. And it was a major change.

But in some ways it was just a different way of doing the same stuff – getting the image from your camera to the client. The market the client and photographer were in hadn’t changed that much, nor had the way the photographer connected with the client.

What you need to know now

But I think the biggest change the pro photographer will face is just becoming apparent now. The market – stock, editorial, commercial, wedding – is changing drastically. Some sectors in decline, like the newspaper business, but they’re all being recreated in unpredictable and exciting ways. Much of the communication, marketing and day to day work across all markets is now online – which requires a new set of skills.

Running a photography business has always been about a lot more than being a good photographer – and all the clients I’ve mentioned here are way better photographers than I’ll ever be – but now the list of skills required is different.

Here’s a partial list the biggest gaps I see in my completely unscientific experience of working with a range of photographers over the last few years:

• solid grasp of digital workflow, including captioning and keywording, backup strategies and the pros and cons of different file formats and sizes
• knowledge of monitor calibration issues and color profiles
• moderate internet skills (everything from using search engines effectively to email and discussion board etiquette)
• ability to update your own website with text and images (including an ability to write clearly)
• moderate social media skills (you don’t have to be tweeting ten times a day, but you should be able to asses which social media platforms could help you and how you could start using them)
• a good grasp of how your particular markets are changing, and how you can adjust

Dane Sanders, in his valuable book Fast Track Photographer, describes a Grumpiness scale, which outlines how likely a pro is to look at a list like the one above and complain that ‘It wasn’t like that in my day. All these kids coming in, stealing our work. Why can’t I just take pictures.’ (or words to that effect). I think that attitude is obviously a problem, but I think the bigger problem is skills gap among some photographers.

To their credit, the first two photgraphers I’ve talked about here manfully got over their initial discomfort with Wordpress and Photoshelter and have been making changes to their sites themselves. And the good news is that there are plenty of resources available for people like them who want to learn some of the other required skills.

But if you’re an established pro or a newcomer to the industry and you don’t at least make an effort with this stuff, you’re going to struggle.

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.

Learning to See

A good writer is observant – you can’t tell a convincing story if you miss the important stuff. And often what’s important are subtle changes to the ordinary that most people don’t see.

For a journalism article, it might be a telling quote, and for a photograph it might be way the light catches a face just so, but you need to be paying attention to catch these things.

So by character or by training, writers notice all kinds of things that others don’t – a trait that’s also invaluable in photography.

Showing Only What’s Important

A common mistake among people just starting with photography is to show everything in a photo. They might want to photograph someone enjoying their first sip of Guinness after a hard day, but their photograph includes half the pub.

Which is kind of like a writer of the same scene describing what everyone in the bar looked like, the names of all the drinks on offer and how many beer mats were stacked up near the pumps.

Not everything matters the same amount, and knowing what are the important things in what you’re communicating is key.

Writers might do that with careful editing of a first draft, stripping away the irrelevant and polishing what’s left. Photographers have less time to do it in the capture (but some later cropping might help), but it’s a different application of the same skill.

Part for the Whole

Related to the previous point, there’s a classic writerly device where you use a small detail to represent a larger idea – synecdoche it’s called if you’re being precise. And it’s something that really helps in photography.

In the pub example above, maybe you don’t even show the whole drinker’s face, or the whole pint. A detail of the fingers round the top of the coldly glistening glass as the beer settles might be all that’s needed.

To do this well you need to stop asking ‘What is this a picture of?’, and start asking ‘What is this picture about?’.

The Dramatic Moment

As well as spotting details that carry weight, a good writer has an eye for that key dramatic moment – the point at which time stands still.

To my mind these come in two flavors. Either it’s the one moment that is a crystallization of an emotion – the utmost point of joy, sorrow, reflection, bravery . . .whatever. Or it’s the point at which everything changes, where there’s no going back to how things were before.

This is obviously related to Cartier-Bresson’s idea of the decisive moment - the point in time and space where the camera captures the perfect representation of an event.

Some of this is luck, of course, but some of is practice and a feel for how events unfold. There are times when I’ve been working on an article or a section of the book when I’ve been watching events unfold and I get a sense that what’s happening at that exact moment is the key, that I need to remember this or get it down on paper right away.

I get that with the camera too, where there’s a strange sense of anticipation of an event, and when it happens it’s like the Universe went out of its way to arrange things for you. Just make sure you don’t miss it.

Telling Stories

If there’s one thing a writer should be good at, it’s telling stories – arranging material so there’s a flow from beginning to end.

A single image can tell a story, though often it captures that crucial dramatic moment (see above), leaving the viewer to fill in the back story or speculate about the future. That’s a great thing, but it’s a sequence of photos can more obviously have a narrative drive.

David duChemin has a great outline of how this can work in his book Within the Frame, but a version of the approach goes like this:

• establish the scene with a wide shot to give context
• follow up with some activity shots to show what happens there
• add in some details to flesh out the environment
• show the decisive moment shot that captures the essence of the place or event
• leave with a final image that suggests closure or shows the way to the future

In its own way, this is a pretty good model for a piece of writing too.

Knowing when to break the rules is as important as when to follow them, of course, but photographers should definitely be thinking about narrative as much as writers are.

Words and Pictures Together

When I was on a recent journalism assignment for New Mexico Magazine, writing about a week-long cattle drive in Roswell, NM, I spent a long time talking to Chuck West, the photographer who accompanied me.

He wanted to know what I was going to write about, so he could make sure he covered it with his images, and I wanted to know what he was taking pictures of so I could write about it.

We were really asking the same thing – what have you seen that strikes you as important? What sense can you make of all this? The details, the story, the decisive moments, the part-for-the-whole vignettes . . . we were communicating in different media, but there could be no real communication without observation and reflection. We each noticed particular things and then arranged a story around them based on what we thought was important.

You can’t write or photograph well without there being a thought behind the act, and that thought is driven by careful observation.

Would I like to write and photograph a single topic, to try both media to communicate the same ideas? Yep, that would be great, although the concentration required for each is a little different, and it might be hard to do both at the same time.

But being able to communicate the same conclusions across the two media would be a great opportunity.

Clearing the Vision

The similarities of writing and photography for me are captured in a quote of Ansel Adams:

“Through the art of brush, pen, and lens … we possess a swift and sure means of touching the conscience and clearing the vision.”

Which is why my photography business is called Clearing the Vision. We see so much – just can’t stop ourselves without closing our eyes – and miss almost all of it.

In my earlier career as a writer it was my job to sort through all that and present what really mattered elegantly and succinctly with words. And now it’s my job to do it with a camera. But while some of the craft might be different, I think the crucial skills are the same.

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.

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.

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.