Guest Post: Getting great photos of your toddler

Here are some great tips and tricks to getting great photos of your toddler.

Today’s guest post comes to us from George Minton from Cameraseals, and he writes on the topic of Getting great photos of your toddler.

As a father of 3 children, now 9 years-old, 7 years-old and 4 years-old respectively, these photography tips are true to form and will work well in capturing the great photos of your toddler. As parents, we tend to want to, or should I say, need to document everything when our first child is born and to a lesser degree when our other children are born, but we still do want to do our best in getting the best moments and memories caught on film (well digital film these days). I have found personally, that they just grow up too darn fast. It still feels like yesterday that my youngest was born.

As an owner of a Nikon D5200 with a wireless adapter to connect it with my iPhone X via a Nikon app which is now replaced by the newer model, the Nikon D5300, I am one of those people who want to get pictures with depth of field using a DSLR camera. The D5200 also captures video. These days, however, with my iPhone X, it also has great depth of field with its dual cameras on the front and back of the phone. I almost use it more than my Nikon D5200 to capture pics of the kids. Well, anyway, I am getting off on a tangent, but the point is that I truly do love great pictures of my kids and pets and love looking back at the moments often and fondly remembering them when they were their youngest.

Here’s a pic I took with my Nikon D60 back in 2010 at Burke Lake Park in Fairfax, Virginia when we lived there back then with my wife and oldest daughter staring out over the water while we were close to the due date for my middle child in the fall of 2010. It still holds up today and it still hangs on the walls of our home. It is absolutely one of my favorite pictures. I hope you think so too.

Here is how good an iPhone X can be these days in comparison to a Nikon DSLR. As you can see the portrait mode is fantastic in that the dual lenses are able to isolate the subject of the image while darkening everything else. The cameras in this phone are fantastic. Here is a picture of my Chesapeake Bay Retriever, Sadie Magnolia on a casual Saturday morning. So, these days, you can take great photos of your toddler even without a DSLR camera like those I mentioned above.

It’s true the moment itself can often be frustrating getting your little one to sit still, to look at the camera and to smile for goodness sake, but it is our hope here at Windy Pinwheel that you find these tips worth their weight in gold in getting these very things to happen with your toddler.

Thank you for the great guest post article, George.

Enjoy.
– Will

Toddlers are the most active, and fun, subjects in photography. But because of their hyperactive energy, photographing them can be challenging.

Thankfully, there are tricks available that you can use to get great photos of your toddler. If you don’t know it, here are some tricks to start with.

6 Tricks on how to get great photos of your toddler:

1. Go for the action shots

Children usually learn how to run at the age of 18 to 24 months. So, if you’re photographing children with that age, keeping them stand still will be a challenge.

The best way to deal with this is to let them play while you do actions shots. Action shooting is a good technique because it captures the current stage of your child’s life – their emotions and the movements they can do.

It may be exhausting because you have to keep up with your child’s energy level. But the result is undeniable good.

2. Give them something to look at

Did you know that there are toddlers who don’t want to look at the camera?

The common tricks parents do is either beg or bribe them. Begging doesn’t work all the time compared to bribing. But if both don’t work, you can still get their attention by giving them something to look at.

A toy like a PEZ dispenser is always the best option because they simply love it. You can place it on top of your camera, and tell them that they can have it or it will produce candy if they look at it.

3. Let them see themselves inside the camera

If a toddler doesn’t want to participate in picture-taking, one of the best ways to deal with it is by involving them in the process.

First, take a picture of your child while playing. Once you took a couple of pictures, sit beside your child and showed the result. The key in here is to intrigue your child on how you did it.

Show your child how it’s done, and once you see that she/he’s amazed and excited, that’s the time you ask if you could take a picture of her/him. If your child says yes, grab your chance! But if not, just take a little more convincing and you’ll surely get your child to pose or even look at the camera.

4. Get them distracted

Not all tricks in getting your child to pose in front of the camera involve begging or bribing. There are some ways that you can take it without them knowing. But still, get the result you wanted. This is by distracting them.

One of the effective ways to distract them is by keeping them talking. Some said that if a child is talking, their mind will focus on that and will never notice if you took out a camera.

But be fast because they can snap out of that distraction easy.

5. Focus on the eyes

Another technique used to get great photos of your toddler is focusing on their eyes. This is because the eyes of a child are charming and give a lot of emotion.

To make it sharp all the time, you should learn how to use the focus point of your camera manually. With this, you’ll have the full control in deciding where and when to focus.

6. Find good light

If you’re doing photography, you probably heard this all the time – find good light. Since children can’t be exposed to artificial light for too long, it’s better to learn how to use natural light.

If you’re doing the photo shoot at home, you can always do it in the middle of the day where plenty of lights are available. But if you have certain effects that you wanted to achieve, you can place your child on different part of the house where light can pass through freely, like windows or doors.

Knowing the techniques is one thing and using the appropriate equipment is another story. If you want to know more about how to choose a good point and shoot camera (under $500), you should read this review on Cameraseals from David.

So, have you used any of these tricks and tips before? How did they work out for you? We’d love to know. Please share with a comment below. We hope you enjoyed readhing these 6 tips and tricks on how to get great photos of your toddler.