Photographing Children

Photographing Children

by William Lulow

The photography of children presents different sorts of challenges for the photographer. Young children are always moving around so photographers have to be quick. Older children often get bored during a photoshoot so, photographers have to think of ways to keep them occupied and challenged. I have always tried to come up with different kinds of distractions for older kids like making jumping pictures or otherwise engaging them in some sort of action or trying to play some psychological game with them like asking them to make a face and then catching them before they actually do it. It’s something that they won’t be expecting. Most kids have heard a behavior line or two from their parents prior to the shoot, so a line like “What did your mom tell you NOT to do today?” often elicits great responses as does the “jumping”:

One thing I always do before photographing children is to be ready to go from the moment they arrive at the studio. Sometimes the very first frames are the best because the kids aren’t bored yet. Here is one such example:

This was the very first frame I shot just before my vacation, of these two brothers, and I think, perhaps it was the best one. So, when shooting children, always be ready to go from the very first shot.

Another thing I like to do is to shoot kids against a plain, white background. I have quite a number of families with children who rely on my services year after year and the best way to document their children’s growth is to photograph them against a plain background. There are oter ways, to be sure, but this is both a standard way and is also very easy because the lighting is the same every time.

The secret to getting white or any specific color background is that they have to be lit separately from the subjects. You cannot expect a mainlight to light both subjects and background unless the light is very close to both. The nature of light is that its intensity falls off sharply over even the slightest distance. That’s why images lit with a flash mounted on the camera often have black or dark backgrounds. Here’s an eample:

That’s a super white background my granddaughter, Dylan is standing on. Notice how it is reproducing a kind of medium gray. Also notice that the lighting on her is pretty good. That’s because I was using a flash-on-camera for this particular shot. Light fall-off from an on-camera flash is usually dramatic. Anything about a foot behind the subject will be at least one f/stop darker than it appears. Here’s a much better version:

This background was exactly the same as the first one above, only this time it was lit separately. Here is a lighting diagram of this setup:

In this case, I wasn’t using the fill-in light shown here to the right of the camera. It was just the one, big mainlight plus the two other background lights to make the white paper register as white.

So when photographing children, keep these several ideas in mind:

1. Be ready shoot as soon as they get to the studio
2. Try to keep backgrounds a plain color
3. Light backgrounds separately from subjecs
4. Try to engage kids in some movement activity to keep up interest.

The last idea is to make it a fun experience for the kids so that they love to return and look forward to the next shoot experience.

When dealing with infants, I usually have the mother or perhaps a baby nurse swaddle her and then I photograph her lying on a white background, either a blanket or some other plain background. Then I try to get directly overhead with a wider angle lens and my soft flash rig mounted right on the camera. It looks something like this:

The large, satin reflector is actually mounted on the small, portable flash that fits on the camera’s hot shoe. It is large and so it creates a soft light and I can maneuver it directly over the infant to get an image like this:

This creates just about a shadowless type of light that will show the swaddled infant off very nicely.

One other piece of advice when it comes to shooting children: tell parents not to cancel a shoot because a child is unwilling to come to the studio or is in a bad mood. I have found that once they see the studio with all the lights, their moods often change quickly.