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?
Taking photographs of children for friends was the first photography I did that wasn’t just for my own amusement. It’s how a lot of children’s photographers start, and it’s still something I really like to do, but it had been a while since I’d done a session for friends.
Maybe this was the reason I was nervous during the shoot for my friends Tim and Heather, and their lovely daughter Lillian, who was around 2 months old.
Sometimes you’re confident you’re getting good images. Other times you feel you’re just shooting dross and are waiting for (and partly willing) the client to tell you to go home and forget the whole thing. This was more like the latter feeling, but my friends probably wouldn’t have thrown me out.
These wobbles beset me more with young babies than older kids, perhaps because it’s harder to form a connection with a young baby. Normally, if the child is having fun and is tolerating my foolishness, then I’m happy and I’m reasonably sure the images will be good. But if you’re not getting any feedback from the subject (because they’re too young to give it), there’s less to feed off, and you start wondering if you’re just a faker.
That said, I was happy when I got home and looked at the images I’d got. Tim and Heather are delighted new parents, and are reacting to the drastic up-ending of their lives with good grace, good humor and real affection, and the pictures show some of that. There’s not much more you can do when a baby’s first home – I remember feeling that it was a day of huge achievements if I managed to dress myself and make it down the driveway to the mailbox.
Lillian is bright and aware – she seemed very curious about me – and like most babies, looks positively angelic when she sleeps.
So even when you’re not sure you’re getting the shots you want, keeping an open mind, asking yourself questions while you’re shooting, and reacting honestly to what you see in front of you get you through. That, and a sleeping baby shot
Here’s an Animoto slideshow of more of the images from the day.
I don’t normally shoot events, as children and family portrait sessions are my main work, but when my friend Elisa Dry from asked me to take photos at their recent party, I had to say yes.
My daughter started going there when she was 2 and it really boosted her physical confidence as well as being a lot of fun. I also did some shoots of their classes a little while ago (some of the images on their website are mine).
Elisa was throwing an appreciation party for all the coaches, volunteers and staff that make Tumbledown such a great place. It was a good opportunity to get some individual images for the studio wall, but also get some family and kids’ photos at the same time.
The party was at the Cowgirl Hall of Fame here in Santa Fe, in their Western-themed private room, complete with wood-clad walls and low ceilings. There were no quiet corners to set up in, and it was all a bit tight on space.
I ended up setting up in front of the fire, and there being no room for a backdrop, we used the fireplace stonework instead. The room was pretty dark and there wasn’t really any space for two lights, so I shot with a single flash off-camera on a light-stand with a shoot-through umbrella.
The flash was triggered with my Alien Bee remotes, and the setup worked pretty well considering the constraints.
A fill light from the left and a hair light from behind would have made everyone stand out a little more, but this wasn’t a studio shoot.
The main thing was that everyone was friendly and happy in their shots – it’s a little like being a stand-up comedian corralling people and putting them at their ease in an unusual situation.
Being in front of a stranger with a big camera and a funny accent must seem peculiar, especially in a room full of your friends and family.
We got through all the coaches’ individual shots, the groups and some individual shots of the kids before I left them to the rest of their night.
And I got a big old plate of barbecue with all the fixings to take with me – a nice bonus.
Thanks to Elisa for thinking of me, and thanks to all the great folks from Tumbledown for making it all run smoothly.
It’s Fiestas time in Santa Fe, one of the highlights of which is the Desfile de los Ninos, also known as the Pet Parade. Originally an occasion for children to bring their pets to be blessed by the priest, it’s broadened into a relaxed and funky parade including high school bands in fancy dress, chickens in cages, some amazing costumes and still a large number of children and pets (including this year chickens, rabbits, cockatoos, ferrets, cats and lots of dogs).
Shooting a parade like this sounds as if it would be easy with all the great spectacles on offer, but it can actually be tricky. The first problem is that you can’t move around too much – I had my spot on the side of the parade route and that was about it. So choose wisely and watch the direction of the sun – I was almost shooting straight into it today, which wasn’t ideal (but I was right outside the door to our office, so at least I had hot coffee).
Another problem is that there’s likely to be a lot of visual clutter. Your naked eye filters out the messy background when you see a cute dog dressed up like a cowboy, but the camera will also show the random feet and the white line on the street that your eye glossed over. The other people in the parade (and the other people watching it from across the street) make it hard to get clean shots (especially if you can’t move around to edit them out). You can shoot wide open (in other words with a lowest number aperture your lens can deliver) to create a narrow depth of field, blurring the background, but this brings up another problem – lens choice:
Sometimes you want an wide-ish establishing shot – to show a whole group of folks as they approach, for example. Other times, it’s the little details that stand out. This mixture is a good approach, but that calls for a range of maybe 28mm – 200mm or more on a full frame camera (around 18mm – 130mm on a crop sensor). That’s a big ask of any single lens especially if you want some good sharpness wide open.
In other years I’ve swapped between my 24-105mm f/4L and 70-200mm f/4L on one body, but that’s a bit of a pain, so this year I cheated and used two camera bodies, putting the 70-200mm on my old backup Rebel XT and keeping the 24-105mm on my 5D. The downside was that I looked like a newspaper shooter, but the upside was that I had the equivalent of a full-frame range of 24-320mm at my disposal.
I wasn’t trying hard to capture decent shots of every group that passed, just photograph the things that grabbed me the most.
Here’s a selection from this year’s parade, with a few from earlier years thrown in for good measure.
On Saturday my friend Ned and I got together to explore an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while. ‘Wouldn’t it be great,’ I thought, ‘to help photo enthusiast parents take better photos of their kids?’
I’d bring my stuff over as if it was a shoot I was hired for, but as well as taking photos myself, I’d also help Ned with his images.
Santa Fe might not have been as hard hit as some parts of the US, but the recession hasn’t left us entirely alone. These pictures were taken on a walk around the downtown area yesterday.
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:
