How to Take Portraits of Babies

Video Transcript

"Hello. We're going to talk about how to take pictures of babies today. Now, there's a lot of variables that go into play with taking photographs of babies. One is the parents. The parents have to have lots and lots of patience. And there's various times that you can take photographs of babies, but depending on what you're going for, it's kind of when you want to time it. And what I mean by time it is all babies have sleep schedules, and the parents are very familiar with those. Usually early morning or right after the child wakes up is going to be the best time to get those little giggles and grins like after you give the baby the food or after the mom feeds. But if you want to get the nice quiet, subtle shots, most of the better shots that I've taken personally have been while the child is sleeping. We'll set up little still-lifes, like maybe get a pile of teddy bears and put the baby on top of something soft. It has to be soft, because obviously the baby is delicate. But there's various ways, various lenses you can do, ideas that you can get. I've seen some where they take a baby and they'll, some photographers will put them on scales instead of still-lifes like that. So it shows the weight. So you get multiple different kind of viewpoints when you're looking at the image. So you get the baby on the scale. And that looks very cute, with it sleeping. It looks very nice. And you get the actual weight of it. And you can kind of make it a little bit soft with white, or you can make it more dramatic and put some black colors in there, like black fabric like you see under my cameras here. I've actually used this for photographing babies in the past. But you want to make sure whatever you use is washable. Very, very important. Lots of times, you're going to have to wash things immediately after use, but we won't get into that. Let's talk about lenses to photograph babies. You've got various different techniques you can use with the lenses. Long lenses compress. You want to get pictures of hands. Hands are important. When a child is just born, they don't have cartilage in their knees and a lot of their joints. So a lot of the joints look kind of chubby, and that chubbiness is cute to the parents. So these are things that only the parents would notice, or somebody that had had a child. So it's just cute little moments that people want to remember. So very nice. The long lens compresses. So if you're standing back, and you want to really make the hand that's in the front look like it's very, very close to the child's face. You can get impressions, if the baby smiles. Some babies don't smile until they get a little bit older, say maybe six months to a year. Whereas, if you used a wide angle lens, it would take that hand that's in front and make the face look like it's really far, and it would distort. So wide angle lenses, like for instance, this is the 14 to 24 that just came up by Nikon. Extremely sharp lens. If you've got it, you want to use it. But don't use it on babies. It just doesn't work. Now this is the 85 for Nikon, the 1.4. And Canon has a lot of prime lenses, as well. And what I mean by prime is there's no zoom. It's a fixed lens. This is a 1.4 lens. So you get a very minimal depth of field; very, very tiny. And that's good for getting fingernails. If you want to get just real little details- fingernails or eyelashes, things like that that are just adorable; or the little hair on the back of the neck, and really emphasize that, you want to use a narrow depth of field. So you're aperture would be 2.8, F2, 1.4. And those are the prime lenses. Those are the ones you're going to do that with. As far as going outside, you've got to be really careful, because of the sun. The sun can damage children. Babies are very, very sensitive. They've got very soft skin, delicate, and you really need to keep them covered up. If you're going to photograph a child outside, you want to make sure it's in low light, say a shady situation. On a relatively warm day, they get cold easy. And what I do is simply shoot at sunset. I'll do sunrise portraits or sunset portraits in that last hour or first hour of the day. It's usually pretty good for about 30, 45 minutes, right there when the sun goes down or first comes up. You get just beautiful soft light, shows detail. If you want to really make an image dramatic, you can use side-lighting and create shadows. And that way, you can show if the baby 's head is turned toward the light itself, not necessarily the camera but the light, you get a good light on the face. And then everything else will be kind of black and dramatic with shadow. It'll look really nice for you. But any idea you come up with, you just basically choose the light. Make sure you, you know, you understand you're dealing with a delicate situation. And I wish you the best of luck. This is Tom Sapp- how to photograph babies."