Every Mom wants to take great photos of their babies and toddlers. We all want professional looking photos for our children without paying a fortune! This better baby photo article will help you take the best photos you can and you don’t even have to own an expensive camera.
When I had my first baby 4 years ago, I became extremely interested in photography. I wanted to capture every precious moment and every important milestone on film. I am sure you are just like me in wanting to take these same precious photos of your baby or toddler. I now use a digital camera and take professional looking photos everyday of my 2 little boys from these 5 simple tips below. These 5 tips will help you take better baby and toddler photos.
1.) The first tip I suggest is to be aware of the lighting. The best place to take photos is outside in a natural setting. You should take photos early in the morning or late in the evening right before the sun sets. Remember to use your flash for fill flash outside. This lighting produces stunning results!
2.) The second tip I suggest is to get closer to your baby or toddler and get down to their level. Never photograph your baby or toddler from above.
3.) The third tip I suggest is to make the setting/background simple. Try to place your child near a simple or plain background.
4.) The fourth tip I suggest is to take lots and lots of photos. The more photos you take, the more photos you will have to choose from. You may just get lucky with an adorable one of a kind photo of your baby! You may capture the perfect moment! So, never stop taking pictures!
5.) Invest in a good digital camera. It doesn’t have to be an expensive digital camera. You can buy a good digital camera for under $300. I use an inexpensive Kodak digital camera and great photos of my baby every time.
You are now on your way to taking better baby and toddler photos.
Copyright 2005 -All Rights Reserved
About The Author: Amanda Compton is a work at home mom to 2 little boys. She owns and publishes a fun site for Babies and Moms, http://www.ContestForMoms.com featuring a free baby photo contest, mom forums, and lots of baby & mom information!
Feel free to re-print this article provided that all hyperlinks and author biography are kept as-is
Remember the good old photography days?
Film camera in hand, you would see that perfect landscape, seascape or sunset and shoot off several shots.
Perhaps a couple of weeks later, once you had returned home and finally finished that 24 or 36 exposure film, it was off to the photo-lab to get the film processed.
You eagerly open the packet of photographs, looking for that superb seascape you took, knowing that it would almost certainly be taken up by National Geographic for their monthly magazine spread.
What do you find?
A not too bad photo, but the seascape horizon is crooked, here’s your excuse, I hear you say.. “Well when I took the shot I was standing on the side of a sand dune and quickly trying to get that perfect shot while the little sailboat was still in view”.
Does this sound familiar to all you budding Adam Ansels and/or Lord Snowdons?
The photo is relegated back to the packet never again to see the light of day.
I had many of those packets of not so perfect photos until the digital photography age arrived.
The Digital Darkroom has arrived
The advent of the digital camera and in fact, before that, computerized image manipulation software such as Adobe Photoshop has completely revolutionized the way we can now resurrect a stunning image from what at face value might have appeared to be just one of those snapshots to be relegated to the shoebox under the stairs.
What I’m going to show you in this article is just one method of taking a mundane snapshot and producing a great shot in as little as five minutes.
The example I’m going to use, is one that I have seen so many times, and have already mentioned above, namely, shots that have crooked horizons, whether this be a landscape, seascape, sunset or whatever.
The source of the image may have come from a scanned negative, scanned print or digital camera image all converted to an image format (most probably .JPG pronounced “jaypeg”) that can be opened in your image manipulation software.
Correcting a crooked horizon
The human eye is remarkably perceptive at picking out features in a photograph that are made up of essentially straight lines and that those lines are not parallel, either horizontally or vertically, with the overall print itself.
These straight lines may well be the horizon, but they may also be an object in your photo that has straight lines such as buildings or walls etc…
I will be using Adobe Photoshop CS, but almost all other image manipulation software packages have similar tools so the method described should be repeatable with your own software package.
The method used will employ a little known relationship between two Photoshop functions, the Measure tool and the Rotate Canvas command.
Step - 1
Open up your image in your image editor (in our case Photoshop) and select the Measure tool which if not visible on the Photoshop toolbar can be found by hovering your mouse over the Eyedropper tool and “left clicking”.
Watch the other options window “fly-out” and select the Measure tool.
Step - 2
Interestingly enough, we are not actually going to measure anything in the real sense of the word, nor use the Measure tool as it is usually used (i.e. measuring the distance between two points within the photograph).
With the Measure tool active, “left click” and “hold” on a spot on the left hand side of the photo (remember our example is a seascape) where the horizon meets the sea.
While still “holding down” the left mouse button, drag to the right hand side of the photo and find a corresponding point where the horizon meets the sea and then release the mouse button.
What happened? .. Well you will see that a white line has been drawn on top of the photo with what looks like little “+” anchors at each end. The line is parallel with our crooked horizon.
Step - 3
Now the marvel begins!! Select the Image->Rotate Canvas->Arbitrary … command and the Rotate Canvas pop-up window will appear.
What you will notice (in the case of Photoshop anyway) is that it has “pre-filled” the pop-up rotate options with the exact rotation information to correct the crooked horizon, 1.5 degrees counter-clockwise in our example on our web-site. Click OK and see what happens ..
The photo has been magically rotated the right amount to correct the crooked horizon!
Step - 4
All that is required now is to do a tight “crop” on the overall photograph and save it.
And there you have it!!
Less than five minutes of digital image manipulation to take that mundane snapshot into a photograph that is very pleasing to the eye.
If you find the steps taking are a little hard to understand in this text based article, you can click on the link at the end of this article to see the same method explained on our website with the aid of example graphical images.
© Gary Wilkinson 2005 - All Rights Reserved
You can see this correction method complete with example images at Correcting Crooked Horizons in Photos
Feel free to re-print this article provided that all hyperlinks and author biography are retained as-is.
Gary Wilkinson is a photographer, photographic restorer and the owner of a photographic retail business.
He is also the publisher of the http://www.restoring-photos-made-easy.com website, where other methods of correcting common photographic restoration problems are discussed.
We all want to make the most of our wedding photos and a new service from totalPIX makes it very easy with their beautifully bound photobooks.
Like all the best ideas, the idea of a photobook is very simple. Until now if you wanted to compile your own wedding album you first needed to get your photos printed. Unless you have a very expensive photo-quality printer, this meant getting them printed professionally either online or at a local photography outlet. Then they had to be put in the album and any captions you wanted either hand written or printed out and then added to the pages.
With a totalPIX photobook, you simply download the totalPIX software which includes several wedding templates, drag and drop your photos onto the template, add your captions and then upload everything to totalPIX.
A couple of days later, so long as you are in the UK, your photobook will arrive through the post, carefully packaged in perfect condition.
As commercial litho and digital printers, totalPIX have the latest Kodak digital presses so that every single photo, however small, is printed as though it were part of a half million run mail order catalogue. In fact the look and quality of the internal pages of a photobook is quite similar to the best catalogues although of course the binding is attractive and durable as befits a wedding book that will last a lifetime.
Very often we have different types of wedding photos, there are the formal ones, with everyone demur and poised at the church or registry office and these make a wonderful souvenir of the day. But often there are more informal images we want to keep, perhaps of the party afterwards or just simply wonderful photos that capture a special moment or expression. With totalPIX photobooks, there’s no problem. Create a formal photobook of the day for that special momento and another more informal one that perhaps gives more of the atmosphere of the occasion. And what about a record of the stag and hen nights, or perhaps not!
The ability to add captions makes a photobook very personal. Add the names of guests, the date and venue, whatever is important to you.
Photobooks can be ordered in any quantity from one upwards, and once you have the finished photobook on your computer, so long as you do not delete it, you can re-send it to totalPIX at any time for extra copies for friends and relations.
A major feature of the totalPIX photobook service is its ease of use. If you can use a digital camera, you will find creating a photobook a doddle. The software includes a basic image cropping and manipulation tool if you do not have one already installed. As a precaution against a poor outcome, the software will only accept photos that have the quality and resolution to print well, after all the best press in the world cannot create an award winning image from a poor quality one.
For full details of totalPIX wedding photobooks, please visit us at www.totalpix.co.uk
Sally Kavanagh is a keen digital photographer and is an advisor to totalPIX
