25 kids portraits in one day | Melbourne Child Photography

Today we had the pleasure of photographing all the kids for the parents of our local child care centre. Rea, the centre director was looking for a different style of photographer this year as the parents were not happy with the Pixie Photo style photographer they had last year.  She loved our natural style of photography and wanted us to capture the kids “at play” as well as in  traditional portrait.

Taking on this style of photography was a challenge. Without a flash, lighting can be unpredictable. Luckily the centre had plenty of natural light. For the traditional portraits we set up a 1.5 m roll of pink seamless paper on the floor in front of a corner window and used our favourite prop, the wicker rainbow chair. Instead of the classic school photograph with the the camera at the child’s eye height and a vertical backdrop, we decided to go for something completely different and have the child look up into the camera and crop tightly. I think this style of portrait works well as it reminds us how children look up to us and that we are there to give them support and love.  On a creative level I love shooting this way because you can shoot wide open and have a shallow depth of field that focuses just on the face – and in some cases the eyes. Most of the day I was shooting at 70mm/4.0 at about 1-2 meters away. The flouro lights in the room were also used for light so the camera wasn’t sure which way to swing with its white balance reading. To solve this problem I had a WhiBal card handy to do white balance adjustments later in Lightroom. On the subject of Lightroom, our photo procesing tool, I don’t know how I could have management to process so many photos in such a short amount of time.

Of course is wasn’t all smooth sailing. At first, I didn’t tape my seamless paper completely to the ground so we had some toddlers tripping over it and ripping it. Later on the first day I left the room to do a class photograph only to come back to discover that the kids had drawn all over it! I think having an assistant would have helped out a lot – unfortunately Kate had to look after Pepper, our 8 week old baby.

The “at play”shots were a lot of fun. It is so much more fun capturing kids in their element as apposed to getting them to pose and smile for you.