Little Cuties © Tim Pannell Photography

I got to shoot two little girls yesterday. What a hoot! The youngest is one and her older sister is 2 1/2. They are adorable.

Their parents are friends of ours from church. I see them every week, but I didn’t really know much about their 2 little cuties.

Sisters © Tim Pannell Photography

The first time I shoot with kids, I try not to push too hard for a preconceived shot. It rarely works out the way you plan. It’s better to just kind of go with the flow.

The younger they are, the shorter window of opportunity you will typically have. We shot for under 2 hours, which is a long time for 2 little ones of their ages.

Try to find a couple places that have good available light and backgrounds. Find some props to help keep them from paying too much attention to you and then start shooting away.

We started out with a little kitchen set. Eden, the 2 year old loves to bake! This was the easiest way to get her into shooting without “posing” for the camera.

Eden the Chef © Tim Pannell Photography

Eventually, they get used to you and you can get some natural looking shots of the kids just being kids.

The struggles with available light are almost always focus related. I have great lenses and yet they still struggle to lock on sometimes when the subject has lots of “energy.”

"Popular" © Tim Pannell Photography

Shoot anyway. Even if they’re moving in and out of focus. Sometimes you can get some happy little accidents. Blurry isn’t always a bad thing.

I shot most of these images at f2 between 1/125th and 1/200th of a second, ISO rating of 800. No fill lights, no reflectors. I wanted to show what can be done with no additional lighting.

Little Chef © Tim Pannell Photography

Most people starting out in photography just have the camera and a couple of lenses. Sometimes people mistakenly believe they can’t get great photographs without a lot of “stuff.” You don’t have to have fancy studio lighting equipment to get great shots.

© Tim Pannell Photography

You can add additional lighting to your “kit” in due time. There’s nothing wrong with taking baby steps in the beginning.

© Tim Pannell Photography

The most important thing to remember when shooting little kids is to try to make it fun and no big deal. It’s not life or death if you don’t end up getting an amazing shot.

© Tim Pannell Photography

If you try to force the situation you could ruin a lot of your chances for getting great shots the next time. You don’t want your kids going AWOL any time they see you pull your camera out.

© Tim Pannell Photography

Remember, Just have FUN!
Registration for the Photo Mommies Online Photography Workshop begins on Tuesday, September 22nd.  Be sure to sign up, there will only be 125 spaces.

Chris © Tim Pannell Photography

Would you like to be able to shoot beautiful portraits of your kids instead of going to some schmaltzy cookie cutter photo joint in the mall?  So many people settle for these kind of “one size fits all” portraits because they don’t think they can afford to go to a real portrait photographer’s studio.

Assuming you already have a decent digital SLR camera, you could buy some lighting equipment for the same price or less than you’d spend having a legitimate portrait photographer do the work for you.

There are quite a few common misconceptions about photography and equipment and the kind of lighting power someone might need to do simple portraits.

I do use pretty expensive lighting for all of my commercial work, but for simple portraits I have to dial my strobes to their absolute lowest output and many times that’s still too much light for my needs and I end up diffusing the light source another 1 – 2 stops.

This image of my friends’ son was shot in my living room using one main light and 2 accent lights or “kicker lights”.

You can produce this kind of lighting setup easily against a paper background, or even a wall in your home.

I shot it a f 2 @ 1/200th of a second with an 85 mm f1.4 lens on a Canon Mark II body.  I exposed for the diffused highlights on Chris’ face and then adjusted my “kicker lights” until I got the highlights the way I wanted them.

I frequently shoot wide open or close to it because I like the ethereal quality it gives the overall image.  It’s a great illustration of the concept that not everything in an image has to be or should necessarily be tack sharp.

This is very similar to how the human eye works as well.  Not everything you look at is sharp.  A relatively small area in your field of vision is actually sharp and then everything else falls off rather quickly into being out of focus.

There are quite a few inexpensive lighting setups out on the market that have more than enough power to produce images like this.  Do your research before you buy any of them, make sure they have good warrantees and that the company has been around more than a couple of months.

The great thing about digital is that once you have the camera and lenses, it costs you nothing to shoot and experiment.  With film you could spend thousands and thousands of dollars playing around with lighting setups until you found something that you really liked.

The creative possibilities that we now have at our fingertips because of digital cameras and photoshop are endless.  One word of caution though……don’t use photoshop as a crutch.

It’s still just as important today as it was decades ago to become a master at lighting and exposure control even though it’s easy to “fix” things in post.