Learn How To Take Better Photos Of Your Baby With This Simple Lighting & Angle Tricks
Professional Photographers have learned how to read the environment around them in regards to lighting and how to create that beautiful depth and dimension to portraits. Along with lighting, angles play an important role in what your viewer will notice first in an image, as well as proportion your subject appropriately for their portrait.
Pros tend to use tools like strobe lights and artificial lighting (not always, but most studio photography is accomplished this way); this gives them the ability to adjust the mood and lighting at their will to be able to create the look, shadows and mood they want to portray in their portrait. But you don't HAVE to own professional gear to take a nice, well-thought-out photograph of your loved ones at home.
Here are a few tricks that can help you take beautiful photos of your loved ones yourself, using nothing more than natural light and a few angle tricks.
To prove it can be done, I shot all of these examples on my iPhone (and it's not even the newest, fanciest version!)
Step 1) Find The Light
Find an area in your home that has ample light; usually by a big window. It often helps to have an area with a concentrated area of light to be able to control how your final photograph is going to look.
If you have lights on in your home, or multiple blinds open, this creates ambient light. While not necessarily a bad thing, it can cause things like colour cast (for example: most lights in your home will cast an orange look in your photos) or make it confusing as to where your light is actually coming from in your photo.
Professional cameras have the ability to counter-act colour-cast and unsightly colours, but it's usually best to create a photo-taking environment as close to perfect as possible for the best results!
I've chosen a chair in the corner of my living room; it's situated right next to a nice big window. It was an overcast day, so the light was nice and "soft", meaning the shadows on my subject didn't create harsh lines in the shadowed areas; there is a soft and gradual gradient as the light cascades over my subject.
I closed the curtains on my other windows, and turned off my living room lights as to not over-power or effect the light coming from the window I wanted to use.
TIP: If you are taking photos on a sunnier day, you can situate your "work-space" a little farther away from the window to "soften" the light coming in. Or, you can hang a sheer, white curtain to diffuse the light.
Notice the difference in the whiter, "clean" looking light from the window as opposed to the orange cast of the ceiling lights between the photos.
2) Position Your Subject
Let me introduce to you my little dummy-doll; she has obviously seen better days! She is often my lighting tester in my own studio. She does not have a name, but she will be my model for today's tutorial on lighting and angles.
You will want to position your subject at an angle from the light. The rule of thumb is typically 45-degrees, but I am more the type to adjust the position and light until I see what I like in regards to the amount of lighting vs. shadows, and where the light is falling across my subject.
Lighting takes a lot of practice; it requires training your eye to notice how it's affecting the look of your image and what it's going to make the image look like. It's a constant concept of finesse and adjustment. It can seem really intimidating to beginners. But hopefully, I can "shed some light" on how you use it for your own photos at home!
EXAMPLE 1
Facing your subject directly into your light-source is a common mistake that most people make. Although in our brains in makes sense to light as much of our subject's faces as possible, this actually creates a "flatness" to your photograph. Shadows are your friends! They create depth, dimension and shape to your subjects. By eliminating all of the shadows on your subjects face, they suddenly have a dimensionless look about them in your portrait, with no shadows to define the features in their face and where parts of their face/neck/nose etc. begins or ends.
While the photo itself is not terrible, I like to see a little more "shape" in my images, so this direction of lighting for me doesn't work with my style or achieve the mood I like in my photos.
Keep this in mind when creating your own portraits; while there are general "rules" about photography, if you are trying to achieve a look that tends to 'break the rules', by all means, take a shot at it (no pun intended). But, if you're looking for a rule of thumb to follow by with tips from a pro, then keep reading!
EXAMPLE 2
Facing your subject away from the light entirely is the reverse effect as shown in Example 1.
When you shoot with the light behind your subject, it is called backlighting. Photographers will use this type of lighting in outdoor situations when the light is particularly harsh. When there is enough ambient light to still light your subjects face, even with the light source behind them, you can get away with breaking this rule. But, when it comes to creating a portrait with dimension, shape and depth, this type of lighting would be considered incorrect.
A common issue that occurs when you compose your image like this is overexposing the background of your image while underexposing the subject. You lose the details in the face, whiling "blowing out" (a term used to describe overly-white areas of an image from too much light) the area behind your subject, which can be distracting and, altogether, unsightly in a portrait.
↑ Notice how much of the detail has completely left dolly's face in this backlit shot; you can hardly make out the fine details of her face! ↑
If you are purposefully trying to backlight your portrait, and are shooting in a space much like my living room, you can bounce back some of the light by creating a reflector, which will reflect some of the light back onto your subject while still maintaining that backlit look. You can use something as simple as some white paper or tin foil. However, the position of your reflector (now technically a secondary light-source) will need to be positioned where it will reflect the light into the right places on your subject.
Confused yet?
Photography involves a lot of light-know-how and learning the language of how light works; light can be controlled in so many beautiful ways once you get the hang of it!
Example 3
Unless you're trying to shoot something for a horror movie and wish to not recognize your child years from now in your images, this example demonstrates, hands down, one of the worst but most commonly made mistakes with lighting - and I've even seen lots of professionals do it!
If you are photographing your child on their back, and the light is cascading UP their face, you create the same effect on your subject as if you were shining a flashlight up your face while telling a spooky story around a campfire.
This is called uplighting.
To avoid making this mistake, always try to position your subject with their head pointing towards the light, and never "feet first" toward the light. Remember: you want to light DOWN the face, not UP it!
↑ Notice how the uplit example of dolly exaggerates her eyes bag - EYE BAGS, on a doll! If this lighting creates unsightly shadows on a plastic-skinned, fake baby, imagine how it will distort the face of your beautiful, real-life child. Always. Avoid. Uplighting.
EXAMPLE 4
Whether using my studio strobe or natural light, this is the look I almost always try to achieve when shooting portraits. And it can very clearly be done easily, whether I'm using my professional equipment or just taking a quick snapshot with my phone.
By positioning dolly at an angle from the window, you suddenly notice how her face as a shape. She has a cute little button nose that rises just above her cheeks, her lips form a smidge of a pout, she has "hair details" on the top of her head, and she looks much slimmer as the shadows shape and form her face.
↓ Look at the difference between the head-on lighting vs the lighting from the side of dolly. She looks completely different! ↓
In all honesty, if I was to spend a bit more time in perfecting this shot and my lighting, I may have turn her face a tiny bit more toward the light to eliminate the big shadow between her left eye and her nose (see? you notice these things the most you learn to read the light!) but for example purposes, I've achieved a perfect example of how light and shadows work together to form shape, depth, dimension and a "3D" appearance to your subject in a portrait.
3) Angles
If you take a second look at the last example shown above, you'll notice another difference between those images that drastically affects how dolly looks in those images.
In the incorrectly lit example, I shot the image very far down her body; the first thing you noticed was probably her feet! That's because her feet were the closest to my lense, therefore making them the focus of the image. You probably looked at her feet first, and then her face. Whereas with the correctly-lit example, you'll notice I actually shot with my camera slightly above her, putting her face closest to the camera and making it the focus point.
Angles played a HUGE role in the proportions and shape of your subject.
Have you ever noticed that, when taking a selfie, you tend to find that you like to lift your phone ABOVE you, rather than shooting from the bottom of your face up? The same concept applies to professional portrait photography.
When you shoot at a low angle, it affects the "size" of your subject. You know how they say "the camera adds 10lbs?" That's most likely because they're shooting from below when you SHOULD be shooting from above. Just as the camera can add 10lbs, it can just as easily REMOVE 10lbs (or so to speak...)
There is a phrase that newborn photographers chant over and over again, and it's usually something along the lines of "Don't shoot up the nose, shoot down the face."
Notice the difference between the examples above, and how the correctly angled image is SO much more flattering on dolly than the up-shot image. She looks more proportioned, we aren't looking up her nose, and the portrait magically looks something less like an amateur snapshot and more like a well-put-together, flattering image.
When shooting your portrait with baby lying on his or her back, rather than standing from below and taking a shot from where you stand, lean over your subject and angle your camera so that the lens is looking down their face. Even if you're just taking a photo of their face, this will make or break your shot.
↑ When photographing your baby while he or she is in a sitting position, the same concept still stands. Do not shoot from below; notice how in the incorrect shot, dolly's feet look HUGE while the rest of her looks out of proportion and smaller in comparison with her feet.
In the correctly angled image, she looks more like the little babydoll she is, and less like a giant threatening to stomp all over her viewer. Not to mention, uhm. It's just not a flattering angle. Ever.
Well, there you have it. A small yet helpful guide into how to make your photos better by paying attention to things as simple as which direction your light comes from and what angle to shoot at!
And while there's truly nothing like hiring a pro, an expert in all things lights, cameras, angles and the whole works, taking beautiful photos at home for those times in-between is a wonderful thing, and I encourage everyone in 2020 to practice your angles and lighting; let us create some beautiful memories this upcoming year!
Or, if you want to watch the pro at work rather than try to figure it out yourself, you can:
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