Category Archives: Photography Tips

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Get Down-Photography Tip

October 3, 2007 – 10:56 am

My sister-in-law, Jessie, posted these pictures of Win and Harriet’s cousins on our family blog. I thought that they were a great example my next photography tip. Get down. It is very easy to take pictures from a standing position, but that isn’t always the best angle-especially for children. Taking pictures of kids at their eye level helps to create a sense of connection with them.Look through your pictures for images that you took from a standing position and those that you took from eve level with your subject. Then compare them. You’ll notice that the ones that were taken at eye level tend to be more powerful. This isn’t a hard and fast rule by any means, but more often than not pictures can be improved just by crouching or kneeling.Notice how Jessie was at eye level with her kids when she took these pictures. She also did a couple of other great things. She got close and didn’t worry about cutting off foreheads and she didn’t ask her kids to look at the camera. I love the one of Ezra and Kiah with the hose and shoe. She captured a moment between the brothers who were working together and were not aware of mom with the camera.These are perfect examples of what you can do with simple equipment.

By Rachel Henderson | Comments (0)

Cheese, Do we really look that great thinking about dairy products?

September 7, 2007 – 5:04 pm

“Say cheese,” the classic American way of getting someone to look directly into the camera unfortunately creates images that tend to look a little similar and forced. The subject is looking right into a camera with a forced smile and, if a flash is used, redeye. There is usually very little emotion in these images, other than if you are photographing a middle aged woman who is probably scowling at you with a strongly emotional “don’t you dare take my picture now” look on her face. Try saying the word, “cheese.” Really, while making the E sound your mouth is forced to show some teeth, but only for a short moment. Is showing teeth that important that we try to do it for every picture? A great portrait, with the subject looking right into the camera and smiling a beautiful smile is a very important part of photography. Portraits are great but be careful not to turn every picture that you take into a portrait by asking the subject to look at the camera. For me it’s the candid moments that are the most special.Try this, take a break from asking your subject to say cheese. Have fun trying to get pictures of people doing things without them noticing your camera. You’ll get a lot of bad pictures but the good ones will be priceless. It can be difficult though. So many people, adults and children, have been trained in this practice that they can’t be stopped. I encounter this often at weddings and events. Someone notices that I am photographing them and they immediately look right into the camera and smile. Instead of instructing them otherwise I thank them, take a couple of images and take my camera away from my eye briefly. Thinking that I am finished the subject returns to the beautiful thing that they were doing and I snap a couple more images. Try this little trick next time someone looks right into your camera. Don’t scold or instruct them, just outlast them.Ok, so say you want a portrait. Not every image has to be candid, right? When taking a picture that you want to look intentional try a couple of other tricks to get that beautiful smile. Models are professionals for a reason. Most of us are nervous in front of a camera. It is tough to know what to do, how to smile, where to look. Forced smiles always look that way and it’s hard not to make them. There is one trick that works wonders. Forced smiles look forced, BUT forced or nervous laughs look totally real. Next time you are trying to get someone to smile try getting them to laugh instead. Even if your joke is REALLY stupid and they are laughing at you and not your joke, you’ll get a very real looking smile. Sometimes I ask my subject to give me a really big fake smile. Believe me, they have a very hard time not smiling after that amazing joke.Now put yourself on the other side of the camera. When someone is photographing you, and they are asking you to say cheese, do these things:1. Forget about your makeup, or lack of it. I know that is seems cheesy, but a natural smile is the best thing that anyone can do for their looks. Perfect makeup only goes so far, but a great smile can make any image fabulous.2. Make a small laughing sound. It is amazing what just making the sound will do for your expression.3. Pull your shoulders back and stand up straight. You’ll look thinner, stronger, and happier.4. Turn sideways and look over your shoulder a little. Very few people look great from straight on.5. Put your weight on the foot that is furthest from the camera.Unexpected, and unplanned moments capture the personality and nature of life so much more than planned portraits. But when that planned moment is there confident, natural laughter is so much more flattering than thoughts of yellow dairy products. 

By Rachel Henderson | Comments (0)

Photography/Parenting tip: No chimping allowed

September 6, 2007 – 10:00 am

Janna’s (Jared’s sister) comment on the last post perfectly teed-up my next photography tip. It has to do with a little habit called chimping. Chimping is what photographers call looking at the images on the back of the digital camera. The term comes from the sound that a photographer makes when he sees that he just got a great shot. He sees the the image and then makes a monkey sound-chimping. For more on this click here. Now that so many cameras don’t have viewfinders, just screens, chimping is an integral part of digital photography. It gives you that instant feedback and lets you know if you got the image you wanted or if you should keep trying. It helps make you a better photographer. Professionals try to avoid doing it too much because they might miss a shot if they are looking at their camera. But for most people it is a great habit. So go ahead and chimp away.Here’s where my tip comes in-kids. Kids LOVE to chimp, it’s like pressing the buttons in an elevator. There’s something primal in children that drives them to want it. Don’t let them. If you have allowed it in the past, cut them off. If they are babies, don’t start. As soon as you start allowing chimping you limit your ability to capture a candid image of you child. You get between 1 and 5 seconds before the kid stops feeding the emu (or whatever cute thing he was doing) and runs over to the camera to see the picture. If you have children you probably already know this. I am encouraging you to ruthlessly cut them off. Be a cruel parent and don’t allow them to ever see the back of the camera again.If you cut them off they will start to understand and they will stop asking (ideally). It might a take a couple of battles, or maybe an all out war but it is worth it. Have you ever seen your kid doing something cute and and thought about getting the camera. But then you are struck with the problem that getting the camera would probably disrupt the situation so much so that your child will stop their sweet behavior. Train your kids to ignore you when you get the camera out. Don’t let them chimp. It will make photography so much easier.Jared and Win were at a wedding while I was shooting a rehearsal for another wedding. Jared was holding Win in the back of the dark sanctuary when Win spotted the photographer. He pointed to her and started saying, “Ma ma, Ma ma.” Win thinks is so normal for me to be holding a camera that he thought that anyone holding a camera must be me. Train your kids that it is normal and uninteresting for you to have a camera. Don’t allow the camera to be interesting in itself. The best pictures are the ones that they don’t know or care that you are taking.I’ll post again tomorrow about, “cheese.”

By Rachel Henderson | Comments (0)

Don’t shoot! Cut off heads instead.

September 3, 2007 – 5:02 pm

The title of this blog post comes from a famous photograph in my family. I had a eccentric grandfather who was a musician, photographer, lawyer. In the early ’30s, before he married my grandmother he traveled in Europe, North Africa and Asia playing the clarinet. When he returned he gathered the many pictures from his travels into a scrapbook that my cousins and I loved looking through. In the middle of the book is an innocuous image labeled “the streets of Bangkok.” When you look closely you can see that my grandfather caught a picture of a beheading in the middle of the street. There it is, plain as can be, corporal punishment in Asia 80 years ago. To this day my family still remembers and talks about this image. This story has nothing to do with the photography tip that I am about to give you. I just wanted to tell you about it because it inspired my title.Probably the simplest and most common photography mistake is taking pictures from too far away. I think it comes from a fear that a “bad” photographer “cuts off peoples heads.” In order to protect from that too many people take pictures of their subject, the chair that he is in, the table that he is sitting by and the tree that he is sitting under, just to be sure not to “cut off his head.” This practice creates lots of photographs that all look kind of the same.Not only are many people afraid of cutting off heads but camera manufacturers encourage this problem by putting those little brackets in the very center of the screen. It is way too tempting to use those brackets to aim, and then shoot the picture. Camera’s are not guns, don’t shoot!Here are some examples, I pulled this off of a random blog. The first picture is what the little girl’s mother posted. She used her camera like a gun.Why not get a little closer?It tells so much more of the story, doesn’t it? All that I did was crop the original image. Also, notice how getting closer can be a very forgiving practice if your house isn’t always perfectly clean.Here’s another example from today. Jared, Win and I went to Labor Day picnic. Now Jim Merlino is a great guy, and that fort and turtle are pretty cool……but there is so much more character when I zoom in and take a closer pictures.In this picture it seems like I’ve gotten almost as close as I could to show that Jared and Win are having a watergun fight with a Noel. See how much more emotion there is by just going ahead and cutting off heads.So remember, the most memorable photograph in my family’s history-even 80 years later-has a cut off head ;-). Try it, you might get too close at times, but your photographs will get so much better overall that it is worth a few missed foreheads.Here are a couple more pictures of our evening.Who do you think was having more fun with the large water gun?Win really liked the veggie pizza that the Duncan’s brought.

By Rachel Henderson | Comments (1)

Same Day, Same Place, Same Camera, Same Family, Different ISO

August 23, 2007 – 5:38 pm

As you know we’d been vacationing with Jared’s family in Detroit last week. As I was going through the pictures I noticed a couple that were a perfect demonstration of ISO and it’s relationship to digital noise. We were on a pontoon boat in the middle of the day. My father-in-law’s camera was accidentally set so that the ISO was at 1600, which is way too high for the amount of light available on a boat in the daytime. A couple of images were taken before the setting was changed. Both of these pictures were taken with the same camera, on the same day, very close to the same time. Do you see the difference in the quality of the images? Click on the images to see a much larger view of them. Look closely at the skin tones.ISO 1600 (too high for the situation)ISO 100 (lowest available ISO, which is great for bright situations)The little baby is Willow. Click on the image to open a larger version of it and look closely at her face. Now do the same to the picture of her brother Ezra. Do you see how Willow looks like she has some sort of blue and magenta skin disorder but her brother looks fine. That blotchy, colorful grain is called digital noise. It happens when the ISO it turned up too high.ISO is measured in numbers like 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600 etc… It’s the same as those numbers that were on the boxes of film that we used to buy. Do you remember film? ISO is very similar with digital. ISO is a measurement of how sensitive your digital film is. The more light that is available the lower you can set your ISO. If you are inside or it is late evening you’d have to bump the ISO higher to make sure that you image didn’t turn out really blurry. If your ISO is set too high you lose quality by introducing a lot of unnecessary noise, like on Willow’s face. If your ISO is set too low then you will get a really blurry picture, one of those images where someone is moving their arm and it looks like a see-through moving ghost.Basically, you want to have your ISO set to the lowest possible setting for the given situation. Since there was plenty of light on that boat the ISO was changed to 100 (the lowest) for the picture of Ezra. Do you see how great his skin looks? The quality of the picture changes significantly.It’s important to understand this because settings in digital cameras can be daunting. There are so many menus. Once they are demystified your camera will more fun to use.Don’t worry, I’m not telling you that you have to start thinking about ISO when you are trying to get your kids to keep doing the cute thing that they just stopped doing once you got your camera out. Thankfully camera companies do the work for us. In almost every camera I’ve ever seen there is a setting in the ISO setting list called auto. You guessed it, it automatically sets the lowest reasonable ISO for the situation. Amazing! Even the fanciest film cameras couldn’t do that. Digital is fabulous.Check your camera. Make sure that it is set to auto ISO. If you notice that even with it set to auto you are getting noisy images try setting it to 100 whenever you are outside.Happy snapshots!Rachel

By Rachel Henderson | Also posted in Henderson Family | Comments (0)

Those Tips that I’d Promised

July 13, 2007 – 7:26 pm

A couple of posts ago (in the really long post) I promised photography tips in the future. Here is tip number one. I’ll also include pictures of Win to keep everybody satisfied. Quantity! It might seem simple but very few great photographs were taken solo. Now that most people are shooting digital this idea is within easy reach for non-pros. Here is a screen capture of my computer right after I downloaded the pictures of Win eating oatmeal.Yup, that’s 111 pictures of Win eating oatmeal, and you thought that I just knew how to capture the moment. Now this example is a little excessive. Win was being really cute practicing eating with a spoon and I didn’t feel like I had gotten the image that I wanted yet. So I kept shooting.The point is that good photographs usually come from a series or collection of ok and bad ones. That is ok. Just be sure to delete the unworthy images before you fill up your hard-drive and frustrate your husband. Think about keeping only about 10% of the images that you take.More later.Win has been practicing eating with a spoon and fork lately. I thought about letting him go at it solo and seeing what happened.It started off good enough. . .. . .with a satisfying biteThen things took a little bit of a turn.Who needs a spoon when we’ve got 2 perfectly good hands.

By Rachel Henderson | Also posted in Winfield | Comments (1)