One of the great benefits of parenting in the digital age is that digital cameras make it affordable and straightforward to create a permanent record of your most precious memories. While one of the great advantages of digital is that you can take plenty of photos and just delete the ones you don’t like, here are some tips for increasing your ratio of hits to misses.
Look for a Digital Camera which gets Ready to Shoot Quickly
Photographing a young child is often a combination of documentary shots such as first smile, first meeting with grandparents and first bath and portrait shots. The latter can be sub divided into spontaneous portraits, when you see a great shot and grab it and planned shots. While the ratios will depend on your taste, two of the three types of shots you’ll be taking benefit greatly from a camera which is able to get ready for action quickly.
Look for a Camera with a Decent Zoom
This means optical zoom, ignore digital zoom completely as it is at best useless. If you’re buying a new camera for the occasion, make sure to read the specifications carefully as manufacturers often quote the combined optical and digital zoom capability as the headline figure.
The reason you want the zoom is because it will enable you to take close up shots of your newborn without having to hold the camera up close to them. This will avoid the possibility of unsettling them when they are very young and increase your options for natural, spontaneous shots as they grow up.
Capture all their Expressions
Smiling, laughing babies may make enchanting photos but babies aren’t smiling and laughing all the time. Capture the frowns and the tears and the comical expressions, or their faces covered with food. It’s all part of their childhood.
Get Creative with Angles
As well as the traditional advice of getting down to their level when they’re on the floor, look at other ways of capturing a baby’s eye view of life. Try shooting from behind and to the side of the baby so that you get a better idea of what they’re seeing. If the baby’s being held by someone, try shooting over the adult’s shoulder.
Go for Detailed Shots
Although babies have very large heads relative to their bodies, they’re more than just faces. Hands and feet also show a lot about a baby’s personality and development. Then there are each baby’s individual features, whether it’s the way a particular tuft of hair falls, the shape of their lips or their nose.
The time to get these types of shots is when the baby is already chilling out. When they’re fast asleep you’ll have all the time in the world to get your shots exactly as you want them.
Stay on Top of your Shots
While there’s always a lot to do when you’re taking care of a newborn, these early memories are precious and it’s worth taking the time to ensure that they’re properly organized, tagged and backed up. A short run cd duplication service will help you to produce souvenir CDs, which make great gifts for relatives and friends.
The author is a full-time writer and translator and a keen photographer. She’s on a mission to declutter her house and get old photos and negatives on to digital. This means she’s currently spending more time photographing for eBay and scanning old photos than actually taking them herself. Fortunately her dog makes sure she gets out of the house.
