Photo shoot tutorial

I didn't get interested in taking pictures until I had children. I had an old 35mm camera with no zoom, and all of my first pictures of Spencer were either blurry or too far away. I knew I had to get a new camera - one with zoom, and that made a huge difference. My pictures improved little by little through trial and error. A few years later Jen gave me a book about photographing babies, and I LOVED it. I'm sorry that I can't remember what it's called, and I'm not exactly sure where it is right now. But here are the main things I learned:

1. Get close. Then zoom in even closer. Babies are little, and the only way you can really capture their cuteness is to get super close. It's okay if part of the head gets cut off. The focus is the face.

This is a pretty cute picture, but you can't see Levi's face too well.

Much better!

2. Turn off the flash. I almost never use a flash - it washes out the face, distorts colors and makes everything look flat. There are external flashes and diffusers out there, but that's for fancier cameras.

3. Use indirect light (window, front/back porch, garage, under a tree, etc.). You may have noticed that the majority of my indoor shots are taken right next to my front window or sliding glass door. You don't want the sun shining directly on your baby, so a nice cloudy day like today was just perfect. And I know that we're often told to put the light in front of the subject and never behind him, but sometimes I like the look of light lining my baby's face in a profile view like the one above. You may lose some details in the shadows, but I love the contrast of light and dark.

4. Take LOTS of pictures! Now that most of us have digital cameras, it is super easy to take a gazillion shots. And the more pictures you take, the more likely you are to get a good one. Plus we can learn by trial and error much faster when we take bunches of pictures and can see them immediately.

5. Finally (and this is my tip, not the book's), have fun playing with your pictures. If you have one that didn't turn out so great because of lighting or something, don't immediately delete it. You may be able to salvage it later. For example Levi's forehead was slightly overexposed in this picture (it had that shiny look to it); but I liked it because he looked so cute sucking his thumb. So I converted it to black and white and increased the contrast for a dramatic effect.

You know it's time to stop when your baby gets fussy. My photo shoots are rarely planned. I just happen to notice that my baby is looking especially cute and happy and that the lighting is decent, and I take pictures quick before he gets tired/cranky.

Photoshop Fun

If you ever wonder what I spend my time doing (besides laundry, dishes, cooking, cleaning, shopping and other minute details of a stay-at-home mom), it's Photoshop. I guess you could say it's my other little addiction, besides the actual photos themselves. Because without Photoshop, most pictures are a little on the dull side. There's always a little fixing up to be done. I posted this cute picture of Tyler at the beach yesterday, but it's a lot different from the original.

This picture had a lot of potential because of Tyler's adorable smile and overall good lighting. But I didn't like the busy background (i.e. Megan and Peter - as much as I love them, I just wanted to have Tyler in this picture).

So first I cropped it just enough to exclude Megan. Peter was a little trickier because he was right behind Tyler. So I used the clone stamp tool and spot healing brush tool (the one that looks like a bandaid) to cover him up with the ocean and sand.

One important thing to remember is to always do your corrections on layers so you can easily undo them, compare back and forth, or reduce the %. For example, when I fix the coloring (my favorite is skin tone, which I used above - you click on someone's skin and it adjusts the color beautifully), I often reduce the % ever so slightly until it's just right. Otherwise it can be too yellow.

Then I tweak the lighting just a tad - usually increasing the brightness and bumping up the contrast.

Finally, I love to increase the saturation of individual colors. I don't typically do them all, because it ends up looking fake. My favorites are cyan (which makes the sky pop), yellow (which helps grass look more vibrant - sometimes even more than the green), and either blue or red, depending on what people are wearing in the picture. If someone's face is too bright red, I might reduce the red saturation. So those are my favorite Photoshop features. The more I do it, the quicker I get. I just kinda go throught those steps in order. In fact I didn't save each step when I did this picture for my blog yesterday, so I just redid them real quick just now. So if you thought there was a slight difference between the top picture (the one I did yesterday) and the bottom one (which I did just now), you're right. But they are really close, proving how reproducible and easy it is. Now I really need to go do something productive, like start getting ready for our big trip to Utah. Or maybe I'll go make banana bread out of all our rotting bananas.