DPS is giving away a FREE Canon T3i body and lens to some lucky buyer of Click! How to Take Gorgeous Photos of Your Kids
Yes, you read correctly. Buy a copy of the new and fabulous e-book from Digital Photography School, Click! How to Take Gorgeous Photos of Your Kids before October 19, 2011, and you will automatically be eligible to win a Canon EOS Rebel T3i body and lens. That is a THOUSAND dollar bundle of creative potential prize.
Let’s Talk About the Book for a Moment.
I have been photographing children for almost 25 years and if I was going to write a book about children’s photography, Click! How to Take Gorgeous Photos of Your Kids would be that book.
Rachel Devine is a wildly talented, feet-planted-firmly-on-the-ground photographer with boat loads of common sense. In other words, she’s just like me! Not that I would ever toot my own horn. Gracious me no. I’m southern. We don’t do that. We’re common as dirt down here.
In reading the book I was struck by several really clever things Ms. Devine had to say. For example, in the chapter entitled The Myth of Digital Perfection she says:
“Back in the early days of digital photography, I learned the new medium on my Nikon D100 while still shooting film alongside it for my business. I soon dropped the film and switched completely to digital, and not long afterwards I had a realization about my own work: at some point I’d become a worse photographer than I was when I started out all those years before.”
The Myth of Digital Perfection
She feels it is because she fell prey to the ‘myth of digital perfection’, wherein one stops THINKING while shooting, assuming that everything ‘wrong’ can be ‘corrected’ in post production. It makes us lazy. We no longer take great care in framing images, making sure our exposures are spot on, checking our white balance or even noticing what’s in the background.
Better than simply noticing and cataloging what can and often does go wrong in digital photography, Ms. Devine has some very insightful and easy to implement suggestions to overcome many of these impediments to GREAT photography. Among other things, she says you should limit your number of……(did you think I was going to spoon feed you this information darlings?)
“Really, kids are not that saturated and smooth!”
Ms. Devine also feels we over-edit our images of kids these days, and I couldn’t agree more. On that subject she says:
“Another major issue with my transition to digital was that perfectly fine images were suffering from over-processing in photoshop. It went beyond the minor exposure, color, and contrast adjustments that were once the realm of the lab and correspondingly needed in small amounts for any digital image. It also fell short of a style that I was thoughtfully pursuing with the new freedom of digital editing. It was simply over-editing because I could, and thought I should. The problem was that I wasn’t stopping to actually think about why I was making the choices I was. Really, kids are not that saturated and smooth!”
Click! How to Take Gorgeous Photos of Your Kids is a really great photography ‘cook’ book. Rachel Devine assumes you at least know the front end from the back end of a camera. Beyond that, she gives fantastic tips, techniques and pointers on everything from the psychology of children’s photography, to set ‘staging’, managing energy levels and personality types, and telling an effective visual story.
I’m glad I have the book. It reminds of of a good many things I’ve forgotten, opened my eyes to some new things (!) and made me slightly wistful for the days of yore when I was first starting out. If you are at all interested in photographing children for either fun or profit, this will be a welcome addition to your bookshelf.
You might also want to read some of my tutorials on children’s photography:
Photographing Babies, Birth to One Year – Tips and Techniques
Photographing Young Children with Low-Key Lighting
High Key Portrait Lighting Tutorial
Low Key Portrait Portrait Lighting Tutorial
