Children like to play. Playing is fun. To engage a child so that they are interested in interacting with you and the camera, requires you to have fun. Tease and poke with them, let them stick out their tongues at you and be a little silly. But if the child isn't interested in you or is intimidated by the camera (a common issue), let them wander and do their own thing. Children get engrossed in something often enough that they won't notice you are taking a photograph of them.
The most important photography tip to good portraits are when they are relaxed and being themselves. It doesn't matter if you are 70 and covered in warts or 20 and barely covered, the principle remains the same. Tense people make for tense photographs which often make the viewer, well, tense. This creates and unpleasant effect and anyone viewing the photograph (depending on circumstance) will know something is off and won't like the picture. Relaxed subjects make for more compelling portraits and make people more attractive.
And since kids are often oblivious to cameras, photographers can get the most fantastic of subjects: children unaware of being photographed. They will act and react with utter clarity of passion and nothing makes photographs better than that.
In any case, my friend's daughter here apparently likes the camera and having photographs taken of her. She chased me around after we were done shooting and kept trying to get me to take more pictures of her.
No comments:
Post a Comment