Little girls love ballet and my daughter is no exception, so I was delighted when I got the chance to shoot her pre-ballet class at the Dance for Joy Studio in Santa Fe.
Their teacher Allegra Lillard is enthusiastic and caring, and the girls were clearly enjoying themselves at the same as learning a lot.
Most of the dancers were five or six years old, and in the images there’s a great mixture of the more grown-up elegant moments when they look like tiny ballerinas, and the more relaxed times when they’re just kids having fun.
Good Light, Good Subject, Can’t Lose
Warm sun filtered through the shades on the windows and was reflected by a huge mirror on the opposite wall, creating a flattering light, and with a class full of cute little girls it was hard to go wrong. The class is an hour long and there were around 100 images in the set I showed the other parents.
I shot mainly with the very nice 135 f/2 L (that I’d rented from borrowlenses.com), using my 50mm f/1.4 for some of the wider shots. I was looking for close-ups of faces, full-body shots of individual dancers, and interactions between the girls (with a few detail images thrown in).
I had the great pleasure to be back at Gentle Nudge School the other day to take the class photos for the preschoolers (mainly three and four year-olds), and the pre-k/kindergarten class (mainly five and six year-olds).
My approach is to make things relatively loose but fast-moving. Keeping the children happy and not fussing over every last detail serves two purposes. Firstly, the more time we spend arranging the exact spacing and getting individual hands in ideal positions, the more likely it is that more kids are going to look miserable. Secondly, the children will look like themselves if they’re not cowed and overly orderly.
There’s a risk in this that one or two children will be doing something you really don’t want, but everyone else looks great. A more controlled approach would mean those couple of kids look better, but everyone else looks worse. The children meet in the middle, looking slightly stiff. That’s not the sort of image I want to make as a photographer, or buy as the father of one of the girls in the Pre-K/K class.
To increase my chances of getting more people at their best, I shoot in burst mode (five frames a second or so on my 5D Mark II). That means if someone’s blinking when I first press the shutter, there’s a good chance they’ll have finished blinking when I stop holding the shutter down.
I also use a tripod. It frees me to interact with the kids, and it also means I can swap heads between different frames if I have to – since the camera’s locked down the background won’t move, making the head swap much easier.
I’m really pleased with how the finished images came out:
I recently spent a whole day photographing my daughter’s pre-K/kindergarten class at the Gentle Nudge School in Santa Fe, NM.
There were several reasons for wanting to do this. Firstly, after two very happy years at Nudge, my daughter will be starting a new school in the autumn, and I wanted to have a record of her and her friends. Secondly, it was a whole day shooting candid and relaxed shots of cute kids (mostly aged five and six) – which to me is a pretty much perfect scenario. Also, I love the school myself and have a great deal of respect and affection for the work the teachers do there, and I wanted to share that with the other parents and a wider audience (that would be you).
I’m sure parents always wonder what life is like for their kids at school. Not just what they do, but how they do it, what it’s like in this world that’s so familiar to the children and so closed off from the parents, because we’re just not there very much.
So when I took my daughter to school one Tuesday a couple of weeks ago, I just got out my cameras and stayed. Naomi Brackett, the director of the school, had liked my idea and allowed me to wander around all day unimpeded, and I never got the sense that what was going on was in any way different to what would have happened if I’d not been there.
What I Learned
I sort of knew this before, but my day underlined it: teachers work hard, all the time. There are three teachers in the combined pre-K and K class, and the whole class of around 20 is never doing the same thing all at once – they’re split into smaller groups for different activities.
How the teachers keep track of everyone, deal with minor alarms, provide help and advice and prepare for the next thing is beyond me. Even doing rest time when the younger kids were sleeping and the older ones quietly writing or drawing in their journals, there was no rest for the teachers. I was exhausted at the end of the day, and I was just standing around taking photographs.
The ability of the children to concentrate on their activities was also impressive. They focussed intently on the current task, and then smoothly shifted to their next task. Just as impressive was the good-natured way the children got on with each other – sharing and helping were much to the fore.
I’ve no idea what it’s like at other schools, but what I saw at Nudge was a deeply comfortable sense of teamwork that the kids had with the teachers. The children were full participants and collaborators in the day, rather than just passive consumers of it, doing what they were told. The teachers shaped the program of course, but the kids were comfortable with it, and committed to it with their attention and goodwill. It was great to see.
Technical details
With the photographs, I was aiming to tell the story of the day in a number of ways:
exposition: shots of what the kids were doing (making posters, mixing salt dough, whatever), and how they were doing it
portraits: individual images of the children
interactions: children reacting to each other, or with the teachers
details: that showed more about the life of the school
As this was a personal project, I didn’t have a shot list to fulfil, or an obligation to get an equal amount of images of all the children, but I tried to be as expansive as possible in my coverage, while still being true to the moments and situations that appealed most to me.
At times I’d talk to the children and ask them to tell me or show me what they were working on, but most of the time I shot more candidly, and it was these photographs that I like most. It takes time just to blend in to the background enough that no-one’s paying attention to you, but it was definitely worth it.
I shot with my Canon 5D Mk ii (with my 85mm f/1.8 attached), and my 5D matched with my 35mm f/2. Given the low light in the old adobe rooms of the school (and my personal taste) I was at or near wide open (so under f/2.8) pretty much all day inside.
Conclusion
I’m proud of the images from the day, and very pleased I have such a record of a place that means so much to our whole family.
I left a coil-bound book of around 100 of the images up at the school for the teachers and other parents to look at, and the feedback from them has been very touching. Two sets of parents of children who are departing at the end of the school year have even asked for their own copies 0f the whole book.
It was a very rewarding project to undertake – maybe there’s a personal project near to your heart that you could start on?
I’m sure parents always wonder what life is like for their kids at school. Not just what they do, but how they do it, what it’s like in this world that’s so familiar to the children and so closed off from the parents, because we’re just not there very much.
With the photographs, I was aiming to tell the story of the day in a number of ways: