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:
