PHOTOGRAPHING CHILDREN - I

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

I wrote this article sometime ago before this blog existed. This was posted elsewhere in this website and am merging it to this blog now. This is an account of my attempt to photograph a bunch of kids hanging around during a traditional Indian marriage. I shall be extending this into a small series depicting my various attempts at photographing children, things to look for and keep in mind when shooting kids

Continued at Photographing Children - II, Catch them smiling

Sometime back, I spent some time trying to photograph kids at a marriage ceremony. I knew all these kids in person and some of them were very good pals of mine. So I could get them to pose comfortably and without any hesitation or reluctance. At the same time, I was not really looking for good pictures but passing time playing with them. I was probably looking at making post card prints and give it to their families. So since the lighting was low, I did not hesitate much and set the ISO to 1600 and generously used flash. I still got some decent pictures.


I took a lot of pictures of my little cousin below.



Initially she was quite thrilled about being photographed and posed happily. But as I kept shooting her repeatedly, she started growing conscious and started resisting. Even when she became shy and put her hand around the face, she made a good subject. In the picture below, you can see that she is shying away. But curious as she is, she could not resist peeping out to see what am I trying to do. She did that two or three time in equal intervals. Next time she was about to lookout, I was ready to shoot!





Later, as a reward for playing model, I let her play with the camera and take some pictures herself.


This was the first time ever that I had seen my cute little niece here below. She seemed to know better than me about how to make a perfect picture!




A little later, she pulled in her little bro(below) who seemed to be quite curious about the little black thing pointing at him!



I got talking to these kids while I aimed and made them comfortable first with the camera. And when I found the right moment, I clicked without breaking the conversation, so they wont become conscious.

Below is a heavily cropped portion picture where one of the kids is seen cuddling with her elder sister. I wish I had noticed them in time so I could have made a better picture of them.




And the last one - baby and the grandfather. The little one was uneasy but became comfortable after some coaxing from grampa!



I took all these pictures in a very short span of around 2 hours. When I started, I started it as 'just for fun' thing to play with the kids but soon got addicted to it. But low lighting and need for spontaneity meant that I still had to stick to ISO 1600 and use of flash wherever needed. My Canon EOS 350D did not seem to loose out much on quality with the increasing ISO - something that a lot of people had told me earlier. These pictures were shot as jpeg. The exercise was double fun - some good time spent playing with these kids, and an opportunity for photographing them. But I had to be really careful - at some point, I had to hide my camera from some of these folks who were getting really curious about it.