Kid Photography: Activities They Can Do While You Are Shooting Them
Have you been assigned a kid’s photoshoot and are wondering how to go about it? A kid’s photoshoot can be fun or hectic, depending on how you approach them. The smiles they give during the sessions can be rewarding and satisfying. For a successful shoot, you need to keep the children engaged in the shoot; let them know their role in the session. Professional photographers such as Perfocal understand the indispensability of knowing your photography subjects in order to deliver the best results. Let’s explore some of the best ways to make a kid photography shoot fun, entertaining, and successful.
- Shoot at the Child’s Level
To conveniently capture the mood, emotions, and the child’s feeling at the moment, you should shoot at their eye level. This creates a more realistic perspective on the child and keeps you at the same level. As such, they do not feel coerced to participate in the photoshoot. You should be ready to crawl, roll around, and move with them. In itself, the shoot calls for a lot of patience as the children are in their explorative stage and need to move around and experiment with items. Be ready to move when they do.
- Entertain the Children and Keep them Active
A child’s concentration span is different from an adult’s. This is to mean that a child gets bored real quick. A photographer must come up with fun tasks to have the child do during the photo shoot. You can ask them to jump and see how high they can get. Dare them to run towards the camera and capture the moments as they portray their heroism. Trying these poses with the kids gives you a better edge to capture dynamic shots even while they are in motion. The parents and guardians can then choose their best photos. You not only capture the best moments but also make the children happy and comfortable during the sessions.
- Keep it Real
Most photographers make the mistake of over-concentrating on the smiles. Well, smiles are adorable, but you shouldn’t coerce the child to smile all the time. Be watchful for the moments when they make goofy faces or when they burst into laughter. A natural frown is also adorable as it shows the child’s openness and realness. A kid’s shoot requires top-notch equipment, especially the lenses and cameras. Get one with quickly adjustable focal lengths to enable you to capture all the moments. With the right equipment, you can capture lots of shots per second and pick the best ones.
- Forget About their Face
Do not primarily focus on the face or the front side. The children are mainly on the move, and you cannot keep telling them to look at the camera. To make it even fun, you can let them just be and focus on what they want to do, how they do it, and the satisfaction they get doing it. You can get the best shots as they are at their favourite activities. If it is in the open and the child starts running, you can shift your focus to the feed and blur the rest of the body. When they play with sand or slime, the focus should be on the body parts in contact with the products.
- Make Use of Continuous Shots
The activity levels in children differ from one to another. Some experience hyperactivity while others are docile. You can use the continuous shoot mode for the super active kids and capture as many photographs as possible. The autofocus button also helps you have the right focal point during the high-paced shoot.
Conclusion
A child’s shoot is always a learning experience, as you can never know what to expect. It is even more surprising as you cannot tell a child to repeat a pose (they probably don’t remember what they just did). As such, you need to be willing to learn and flow with the show they put up. Do not wait for perfect moments to take the ideal shots, as they may never happen. Take an interest in everything the child does and take a memory. It may not be a perfect one for you, but it is the child’s genuine emotion at the time.
