How To Photograph Kids, Animals And Both Together
by William Lulow
Note: I wrote this article a number of years ago and have since added to it.
Photographing humans and animals together often makes for problems in portraiture. Since humans usually love their pets, they always pay attention to them and try to get their attention as well. The problem this poses for the photographer is that whenever the pets look good the humans are looking at them or playing with them or something.
The way I solve this is to tell the humans to pay attention to the camera and to always have their smiling faces on. This quickly eliminates the need to look for good expressions on the humans and lets you concentrate on the animal. It’s still not foolproof, but it certainly makes it easier. I always wind up taking many more exposures so that I’ll be sure to get great expressions.
Believe it or not, the same goes for babies. You want the parents to pay attention to the camera and not the baby so that you can concentrate on being able to press the shutter when the baby has a good expression. It’s a little different type of portraiture because you are not looking to get an insightful portrait of the humans as much as you are trying to get a great shot of everyone.
You have to find good angles on the parents and then concentrate on the baby(s). Tell the parents to pose the way you like them and then continue shooting frames to make sure you get good expressions on the baby. One technique that I use when shooting babies alone, is to have one of the parents stand right behind the camera and close to the lens so that the baby will be looking at the parent. Another is to make sounds just when I’m ready to click the shutter to get the baby’s attention. I can do this if the parents are in the shot or not. Be careful not to make too much noise because then the baby will get used to it and not turn to the camera when you want. The same goes for animals. Let them rest for a while. Then call them when you are ready to take the shot.
The other thing I do is to be prepared the moment the animal or baby actually gets on the set. I take plenty of “test” shots to determine my lighting and exposure BEFORE the subject actually sits down under the lights. Often, I get my best expressions right in the beginning. If the shoot goes on too long, both babies and pets get tired and then no matter what you do, you will not get great expressions.
When children get a little older, they often get more rambunctious on the set. This calls for even more preparedness on the part of the photographer. You have to be ready to capture anything they may do, including making silly expressions. Our temptation is to look at the children, but photographers need to be constantly looking in the viewfinder so that compositions won’t be lost.
Here are some recent images from my two-and-a-half year shoot with my granddaughter, Haylie:
These were a couple of the selects. But here are a few others so that you can see what I was going for and why these don’t quite measure up to the ones above:
As you can see from these shots, she was very active the day of the shoot. And you can also see that in these images she wasn’t really paying attention to me, the photographer. I’m always looking for those images when she is relating directly to me! This is not to say that some of these others aren’t cute in their own way, but I’m interested in images that show kids’ interaction with me. Sometimes I act silly to get their attention. I’m almost always on the floor with them, and occasionally, I will stop photographing altogether just to commune with them. That often works to get them more used to what I’m doing.
The one take-away from this short article is that in order to get great shots of kids, pets and both together is to be prepared to shoot a lot and to keep your eye on the viewfinder as much as possible. Otherwise, you just might miss that one, great shot.
