Mom with a camera...

It was the summer of 2009, I had had a continued desire to pursue photography for myself and my family.  My dad would find that his camera was taken 98% of the time, you see he had invested in a nice DSLR (Nikon D70) to take on his camping trips.  He unlike myself prefers nature photography, I like to shoot people;)

We had 5 children (Kennedy wasn't even a year old!) and I wanted to be able to get pictures of my kids that were not in a studio, where they seemed uncomfortable at best.  I had started to notice other family photographers work via MySpace (yep! I had one of those!!) and wanted to see what I could do!!
My children were subject to many photoshoots, I would try different times of the day, different posing and different venues!! I would move around to see where I should have the sun in reference to the kids etc.  I learned ALOT just by playing!!  I started to learn the manual settings on the camera and dig even more into how to make the camera work for me and not the other way around.

Below is one from my very first photo shoot with the kids.

I look at it and can pick it a part for sure, but what I do see is that my posing wasn't half bad!!  I had a semi triangle (could've worked on that!) and they were all connected!!  Now if I had gotten the sun behind them and looked straight on instead of from above, but all of those things came to me later:)

Summer is here, and all of you moms with cameras are probably doing the same thing I do!  You want to capture every moment.  So I wanted to talk about some ways to do this.

First get out your camera, whether that is a nice DSLR, a point and shoot, or your handy dandy IPhone, take advantage of today's technology!!  Here are some tips for posing:

When posing children, you want to make a triangle.  You also want them to be connected.  So arm around each other, or holding hands connected in some way.

Not children, but you get the triangle idea!

The best times of day for outdoor pictures are one hour after sunrise or one hour before sunset.  These are called the "Golden Hours".

It's when the sun begins to soften and is low enough to get pictures.  During this time you can use the backlighting method easily!

Backlighting is my favorite way to light a subject.  For backlighting, you place the sun BEHIND the subject, it creates a beautiful orange glow around the subject.

If taking pictures with your iPhone, there are some fun apps that you can download for free or very cheap!!  A couple of them that I use are:

PicTapGo

PhotoGrid

VSCO Cam

These have fun filters, or photo editing tools!

Go out and have fun this summer, and don't forget to snap a few pics on the way!!

**To ask a question please email: info@imaniphotog.com you just may be featured on next weeks blog!!