Secrets of Child Photography

Hi, I’m Craig from the Craig JC Photography Studios in Palm Beach Garden, Florida.

You know I get asked a lot of questions from my clans, and the number question that I’ve been receiving lately is “How do I get that natural, comfortable photograph of a child on a portrait?” And here at the studio I’d like to share some secrets on how we do that.

When we go on a trip and my wife wants to take some photographs of my children, I have a three-year-old daughter, five-year-old son and another five-year-old son, and when they’re feeling moody and antsy or just whiny plain or whiny it’s very difficult to take a photograph. And then my wife she’ll say smile or cheese which is fine but when we get those photographs back they look sort of fake or cheesy or sort of robotic. And here at the studio we never use those vocabulary words, smile and cheesy, they’re just not on our list.

And what we do here is we sort of stay away from forcing on emotions from the children. We like to focus on their eyes which are very important and I know you heard it a million times but the eyes are the windows to our souls. We’re very patient with our children. We follow them around and we just look for that one look they can give us. I actually get all emotion that’s buried underneath them and it works out pretty well for us or has been so far.

But another secret that I liked to share with you is how to get the child feel comfortable with me especially when I’m looking around a big piece of equipment I’m pointing at in their face. You know children are smart. They’re not going to open up to strangers. I’ve never met a child just open ups to strangers.

What we like to do is we like to be with our children one or two days before the photography. I spent 10 to 15 minutes of quality time to them telling jokes, asking what they like, what they don’t like, and it works out pretty well because when they come back on that day of the photography day they know us and it’s smooth sailing from there and they’re very easy to work with, and we can catch a lot of good quality images in that comfort zone that they allow us to dive into.

So those are secrets of how to get a natural photograph of your child. And now you can visit us on the web and see some more secrets of how to get varied photographs of your children at www.craigjcphotography.com and I like to thank you for watching our podcast, until next time. See you later.