My good friends recently had their first child. He’s incredibly cute and sweet and has a lot of music and basketball in his future if his parents are an indicator of his life to be…

I wanted to talk about baby photography today.

Babies can be the hardest subjects and the easiest subjects, all in the space of about 2 minutes. The real trick is to be as grown up as you can and possess lots of patience and the ability to look for the perfect moment.

I had asked baby D’s mom to meet me last night so I could photograph the baby and his dad for an assignment.

The light wasn’t great and I had to use my iPhone to capture the image.

Baby D was being a trooper. Happy after waking up from his nap, he was the perfect subject!

With children you take what you get (as a photographer). Sometimes they are happy and sometimes, they just want to be left alone. So, when baby is happy, start shooting and be happy for however long that lasts. Five frames or five minutes, just be grateful and move on.

That means you had better have a plan in place.

My plan/hope was to photograph Dad, giving his little by a kiss.

The light was great on baby, but not so great on dad.

I asked one of the onlookers to grab a piece of paper and bring it too me, pronto!

Thankfully, my impromptu assistant was quick and brought me a piece of 8.5×11 paper, lickety split. I placed the paper just out of view under dad’s face to redirect the light from an overhead light to “open up” the shadows on his face. The difference was about a stop lighter. It went from making dad look like a shadow, to the image above. A loving dad, kissing his son.

Next time you are less than optimal lighting, try a make-shift reflector to re-direct some light to even out your scene. Now, you can spend a ton of money on fancy reflectors, but a light sheet of printer paper can do the trick in a pinch.  Be resourceful.

Thanks, baby D! (and mom and dad)

Be inspired!

Hello from the soggy O.C., where it is pouring! But fear not, I was able to make a very nice portrait while staying dry and comfortable inside my house. Today I’d like to show you a segment about portrait photography and lighting.

Manipulating the available light is something that every photographer from beginning to advanced needs to have in their bag of tricks.

In the first image above is a portrait of my daughter, Tara.

I placed her in next to a bank of three windows in our living room that faces north. Very soft even lighting exists here, since the light is not directly striking my subject and due to the sheer curtains, the light is very diffused and soft.

Unfortunately, there is too much shadow on her left side of her face or camera right. A quick a simple way to fix this is with a reflector. Now you can run down to your nearest camera store where they will be happy to sell you a fancy-schmansy reflector for a bunch of money. But wait!

I have a quick and inexpensive solution that is almost always available.

Anything white will do. I grabbed an old poster out of the garage and placed it on top of the piano bench that my daughter is resting her arms on. Look carefully at the reflection in her eyes and you will see it in the lower half of her iris.

Since we didn’t have another assistant available and my labs aren’t very good at standing still, I just had my daughter use her left arm to bend the poster board up towards her face which nicely redirected some of the light from the window back into her face.Loo

See the huge difference it makes? You need to practice how close you need to bring your reflector in to work effectively, but in no time at all you should get the hang of this. Almost anything will work. Try a piece of paper, a napkin anything that will reflect the light from one direction back into your subject will work.

Practice makes perfect and is a lot less expensive than a store-bought reflector. Enjoy!