How to Better Photograph Your Children | Tip 4

This is the fourth part in an eight-part series that will post each week through the first week of May. This series was created by me, Kristin Prelipp Oguntoyinbo, for the amateur family photographer. These tips are simple, quick things you can do to vastly improve the photos you take. I will be using photos that I have taken in my role as the family photographer, not images taken with high end cameras, complicated techniques nor studio lighting. These are images that ANYONE can take, many of them shot with a point and shoot camera.

TIP 4: WATCH THE BACKGROUND

It seems counter intuitive, but any successful photograph BEGINS with the background. A bad background can ruin an otherwise amazing photo. Think of how a painter would work on the background first and then, layer by layer, add the protagonists. When filling up your rectangle (see tip 1) pick a clean or pleasing background so that you can focus on the action, aka. your family.

HERE IS HOW NOT TO DO IT! So here we are in August in North Carolina. It is a hot as Hades and I am at home with a full slumber party of five- my children and their Prelipp Lojk cousins. They had not seen each other all summer so the mood was very festive. The kids were having a raucous game that involved balloons, teams, rules incomprehensible to me and A LOT of screaming. I first tried photographing them in a direction with a really busy background. The detritus of my life, closets, toys, a chair fort, etc. made for a very busy background. So you can hardly focus in on the action.

When shooting digital you can just look at the back of your camera to see how things are looking. I could see right away that the background was too busy. So, I just took a position at the opposite end of the room to get a different view point. The result is below.

Now, with this nice clean background I could just follow the game until I got the right mix of elements. I tend to take a lot of photographs while I am at it. When shooting digital, why not?

Before I put the camera away, I took a quick photo of my favorite people.

Did you miss the second tip? Click HERE to read it. You can also read all of the tips on our FACEBOOK or TWITTER page.