Meet Lyla
Welcome to the world Lyla!
My usual clients are young teens, adults or inanimate objects (e.g. food, restaurants, products, etc.) where the former can clearly express their needs while the latter can’t move/talk. I can pose and communicate with them, or in the case of the inanimate objects, I can pick them up and move them around to suit my vision. Baby photography is, dare I say, a bit outside of my comfort zone. Babies — to my knowledge — usually cannot comprehend nor response to verbal commands and definitely can’t hold a pose. While we can certainly move them to a location/setting of choice, everything that happen are mostly by chance.
Lyla was a bit cranky that day which add to the challenge. Luckily, my assistant (i.e. my wife) was able to wave Lyla’s favorite toy above my head to catch her eyes once every few minutes. Since every “pose” and facial expression can be gone in blink of an eye, I can definitely say that I was VERY trigger happy.
Here are some tips on how to photography babies…
- Work fast. Know your equipment and dial in your lighting as quickly as possible.
- No Chimping. Along with working fast, you can chimp during setup but once you’ve dialed in the lighting, keep your eye on the viewfinder at your client not the images of your client.
- Be trigger happy. Assuming you are shooting digital, shoot as much and as often as your card(s) will hold. As a matter of fact, put your shutter into continuous/burst mode if your lighting can manage it.
- Parent/baby interaction. Keep an eye on the parent(s)’ interaction with the baby. Those are natural and beautiful moments that cannot be reenacted for the camera.
- Multiple set of eyes. Make sure you light the eyes of the baby AND the parent(s) if possible. Along that line, make sure the parent(s) eyes are open because it looks weird if the baby’s eyes are open but not the parents’.
- Comfortable environment. Make sure the baby is comfortable and turn off your strobes’ recycle/ready beep.
