1. Get down to their level
Do not stand up to photograph a knee-high child. The perspective is wrong – you get the top of a head and a foreshortened body.
Crouch, kneel, or sit on the floor so the camera is at their eye level. This single change improves more photographs than anything else on this list, because it puts the viewer in the child’s world rather than looking down on it.
2. Use natural light
A window, or outdoors in shade. Turn the flash off.
Flash flattens faces, produces harsh shadows behind the subject, and makes eyes red. Soft daylight from the side is enormously more flattering and it is free.
Overcast days are ideal – the cloud acts as a diffuser.
3. Wait rather than pose
Asking a child to smile produces the fixed grimace everyone recognises.
Let them do what they are doing and photograph that. The best photographs of children are almost always of them absorbed in something rather than looking at the camera.
If you want them looking at you, talk to them rather than instructing them, and shoot while they respond.
4. Fill the frame
Most photographs of children are taken from too far away, with the child small in a large scene.
Get closer. A face filling the frame carries far more than a full-length shot with a distracting background.
5. Watch the background
The thing that ruins the most otherwise-good photographs.
Before pressing the shutter, look at what is behind them. A cluttered room, a bright window, a pole apparently growing out of a head.
Moving a step to the side is usually all it takes.
6. Take a great many
Children move constantly and expressions change in an instant. Professionals take hundreds to get a handful.
Shoot freely and delete afterwards. The cost is nothing and the alternative – carefully taking three and hoping – rarely works.
And one more
Photograph the ordinary as well as the occasions. Birthdays and holidays get photographed heavily; breakfast, the walk to school and the bath do not.
In twenty years the ordinary ones are the photographs people treasure, because they show what life actually looked like.
