How to Take Pictures of Children with Your Digital Camera: Ten Useful Tips

One of the more difficult things to photograph well with a digital camera is children. This is so because not only is it difficult to get children to sit still, but because the expressiveness that you long to capture is so fleeting. There are two distinct problems here. The first is in capturing clear images of a child that is moving. The second is trying to grab your camera and snap the picture before the moment passes.

The first problem requires a deeper knowledge of how your camera works.

To take clear pictures of children that are moving, the shutter on your camera has to open and close very quickly and your camera has to be held very still. If you're not familiar with camera technology, think of the shutter on your camera as akin to your own eyelids. Just as your eyelids open and close over the lens of your eye to let in light and images, so too does the shutter for your camera for its mechanical lens. In addition to the shutter there is also something called aperture. Think of this as analogous to your pupil and irises. When it's dark, your pupils grow larger, which is another way of saying your irises pull the opening to your lens wider to allow more light to enter. On a camera, the aperture does the same thing. It makes the hole through which light, and subsequently your images enter the lens for processing, larger or smaller. Normally the aperture size is determined automatically by the computer inside your camera. Most digital cameras allow you to adjust the size for yourself if you want though. This would be the section marked F-stops and other such things. If you'd like to learn more, check your user's guide, it's too broad of a topic to be discussed here.

The second part of the problem, capturing images quickly, comes about because of the very nature of the digital camera itself. It has a tiny computer inside and this computer must calculate many things every time you take a picture. Thus, when you press the shutter release button, there is a noticeable delay as the computer calculates the optimum settings for the picture you are trying to take. It's this delay that can cause you to miss the picture you were aiming for.