Photographing Kids: Choosing a Background

Video Transcript

"What we are doing here is a very simple set up that you can do at home. It is so easy. All this is is a bed sheet and I just have it hanging on my drop back stand but you can easily attach it to your wall with some masking tape. Or if you are lucky and you have a couple of other kids hanging around or some friends, they can just hold it up for you. So it is something you can do anywhere and it is very simple. I usually choose a nice clean background to make the subject the most important part of the photograph. So, you can pick any bed sheet really, but I would stay away from one's that have patterns of cars and trucks sort, something really busy because it might be distracting. Another thing to remember is you don't want your subject right up against the background, so I usually have some distance between the subject and the background that way when he is nice and in focus, this becomes secondary and kind of blurry and out of focus. So, another reason why you might use this bed sheet is, say that you are just in your living room and you can imagine that this light coming in is maybe your living room window and in the background is a television or a staircase or some toys, you don't necessarily want all of that in the picture so you can have a very professional portrait studio look by just covering up that background with the sheet. Unless it is Christmas morning or something and what is going on in the background is part of the story. So what you would do is you would hang this background up and then when you frame the picture, you would kind of come in tight on the child so that you are just getting their head and their face and their cute little smile and that way you are avoiding all that background clutter and it makes a much nicer picture."