The Secret Of Taking Great Toddler Pictures

Taking toddler pictures is lots of fun, and the best part is—you get left with hundreds of wonderful photo-memories that you can keep for ever! It used to be that taking good pictures was for professionals; normal people like us had to be content with blurry, poorly-lit snapshots. Then came the digital camera revolution, and the doors opened wide: now photography is for everyone. With the inclusion of decent cameras on many smartphones, photography is become more and more accessible every day.

What does this mean for toddler photos? That while the parents of yesteryear are left with a few sporadically taken, poor quality pictures of their now-grown offspring, you have the opportunity to take as many beautiful, high-quality pictures as you choose. These special toddler moments can be frozen in time, and fifty years down the road, when, an old Grandma, you look over the old scrapbooks—or sit in your rocking chair watching the changing display of a digital picture frame—these pictures will bring tears to your eyes.

Tips for Your Toddler Photoshoot

If you’re still learning the ropes and trying to figure out how to take good toddlerphotos, here are some tips.

• Know Your Camera—Every camera is different, and the first pictures you take on a new camera will probably be subpar quality.  Spend time playing with your camera and taking lots of unimportant pictures, and you’ll be surprised at how fast your pictures improve

• Take Lots of Pictures – With a digital camera, there’s nothing easier than pushing the delete button on pictures you don’t want.  And a picture costs you nothing until you decide to get it printed at a photo shop. Take lots and lots of pictures, and then at the end of the day, delete all but the ones you feel are worth saving.  

This is especially important for a special event where you definitely want at least one good picture—the moment your child blows out his first birthday candle, for instance, or when he meets his new puppy for the first time. On these occasions, don’t feel bad pushing the ‘take’ button on your camera repeatedly. Sure, some of those shots will turn out almost identical to each other. But you can delete these duplicates, and you have much more chance of having one picture where you caught your toddler’s expression perfectly than you would have had if you had just pushed the ‘take’ button once. 

• Use the Zoom—There’s something special about close-ups of your toddler’s little face, but if you put the camera too close to him when you take the picture, your toddler pictures will come out distorted. That’s because the parts of his face closer to the camera are recorded as bigger, the parts further away as smaller.

• Instead, use the zoom function on your camera to zoom in on your child from some distance away.  With the zoom function, you can get toddler photos that at are beautifully close up and still perfectly proportioned.

• Watch the Lighting—Be aware that some cameras do not take wonderful pictures in all lighting. Dusk outdoors, for instance, is one of the worst times to take clear pictures. Many cameras do best in natural outdoor lighting, especially if the sky is overcast. But indoors the flash can make everything bright as well. 

• Your Light Source and Shadows—Keep any bright lights behind you, not behind your toddler. If your child is in front of a brightly lit window or, outside, standing between you and the sun, your photos will not be much better than silhouettes.  

• Shoot Some Interactions—Some of the most wonderful toddler pictures are those in which your little girl or boy is interacting with someone he or she loves. It’s then that their faces really come alive. It’s hard to do quality interaction from behind the camera, so get another family member to play with your toddler while you capture beautiful snapshots of the ever-changing expressions on their faces. 

Saving Your Toddler Pictures

Many parents have lost all their baby or toddler pictures when their computer hard-disk crashed or their camera memory card got corrupted. It’s important to make sure that your digital pictures are saved and back-uped on more than one place. For instance, you could have them on the camera and on the computer. If you need to delete them on the camera, make sure they are saved on at least one other place besides the computer first—an external hard drive, for instance, or a reliable photo storage website such as Smugmug or Flickr.

Have fun taking pictures of your toddler, and capture thousands of memories!

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