Two-Year-Old Shoot With Haylie Emma
by William Lulow
I have written before about how I go about documenting my granddaughter, Haylie’s growth. The best way to document anyone’s changes and growth is to shoot virtually the same image of them at regular intervals. So, that’s what I have been doing for the past two years, every three months. This is what the basic setup looks like when I go to her house:
This is a two-light setup, but I sometimes use only my large umbrella without any fill. She seems to be getting big enough now, where I’m going to need some fill-in light.
It’s really a fairly small set and lately I’ve taken to using just one main light bounced into my large umbrella. The light is soft enough and close enough to Haylie that it produces very little, if any shadow and still keeps the background fairly white. (The retouching is relatively easy if I wanted a pure white background).
Here are some of the other images over the last two years:
By keeping most of the background the same, you can easily see the growth of the child.
This past weekend, Haylie turned two years old, and here are a couple of the images from our shoot:
Photographing children takes special concentration and psychological awareness on the part of the photographer. You have to be prepared enough to notice special moments and quick enough to capture them. You have to be prepared with various ways to get kids to react to things you say in order to elicit special reactions. There used to be a program on television called “Kids Say The Darndest Things,” hosted by Art Linkletter. He always had questions prepared that often got kids to say some incredible things. One of his ploys I like to use, especially with slightly older children is “What did your mother tell you NOT to say today?” You can imagine some of the results. But this kind of psychological ploy, if you will, often works wonders in eliciting incredible reactions. That’s part of the job of photographing children. You have to be ready to capture these kinds of moments.
