Outdoor photo shoot of kids

Goldcoin79 · Sep 6, 2013

I am going to do a photo shoot of my 2 kids which are 4 and 6 and of my niece who is 5 months, with the aim of getting some good shots that I can print at least one on canvas so I can give it to my parents so they have a nice picture of all there grandchildren.

I will be doing this outside in a nice park. Some of the pictures I will do with all three of them nearly filling the frame and a shallow depth of field to put the back round out of focus but I would also like to do some environmental pictures with the kids in and the environment around them. For the pictures with the surrounding environment in, what sort off depth of field would you say I should go for? Should I try and get it all in focus or try and just through the backround out of focus a bit?

Also if any of you have some good idears of positions or posses to put the three kids I would be interested in your idears.

paigew · Sep 6, 2013

I don't generally pose kids. I encourage them to sit/stand/play in certain areas. I would have the oldest sit and get them perfect. Add the two year old last and be ready to shoot. Encourage the youngest too give kisses or encourage the olders to tickle. Just be fast and don't push. As for environmental portraits. Those are unposed, and and rarely directed. I shoot at 3.2 usually, for most everything.

I have a bazillion kid shots on my flickr if you want some ideas

pixmedic · Sep 6, 2013

at 4 and 6 years old they can take a bit of direction, so i would try and get something more along the lines of formal portraiture.
get them dressed up, find a good background to put them in front of, and get some nice portrait shots.
even with a kids attention span you should be able to get a handful of attempts, and grandma will have nice professional looking portraits of her grandkids.
OR.. use backdrops, which is my portrait tool of choice.

this was done with our green screen and our 4 year old special needs child who has the attention span of a gerbil. (kind of a "school portrait" type shot)
you lose DOF with the green screen, but with an actual backdrop you would see the separation. the green screen is a bit of a novelty, but they are cheap, fun, easy to use, and some people really love the idea of dropping in different backgrounds. we bought a disk of 2500 backgrounds for $50.