Move back a little, but still fill the frame with the subject by zooming in.

This isn’t a hard and fast rule for all situations, but works well for lots of portrait photography.  Generally a wide angle lens (like 18mm) up close to your subject won’t be as flattering as moving back farther (ie. 6-12 ft from the subject) but zooming in with a longer lens (50+mm).  Wide angles tend to have more distortion.  To understand this concept, think about what someone looks like if you’re nose to nose.    Usually a little distorted.  But when you get farther away, their features become more natural.  It’s a subtle difference, but one that can make your images look just a little more professional.

Note that when you zoom in very much, any wiggling of your hands will be much more noticeable, creating a slightly blurry image.  You’ll get better results in these situations if you use a tripod.

There are definitely reasons to go with a wide angle lens, to distort things on purpose.  A common situation might be someone sitting down with their foot out towards the camera.  The foot will look huge and distorted, but their face will be fine, because it’s farther away from the camera.

In the past I’ve seen a great chart of photos taken of the same model, going from super wide angle to a super long lens, and you can see how the distortion changes as the lens gets longer.  If anyone can find one of those, I’d like to link to it.

Here is a new cereal box baby announcement we did recently.  See the notes below:

1. I wanted to rotate him a little counter-clockwise, but to do that I had to also clone in some extensions on the bottom of the picture.
2. To get a nice clean silhouette, I cut out the background blanket as well as the rest of he dark background.
3. In the touchup phase, I did a little color correction on the skin because it had a reddish cast to it.
4. The CRUNCH lettering was fun to work on.  Each letter had to be its own layer, and then I rotated and skewed each letter separately to give the feeling of them being angled differently.

Here’s a simple photography tip for those trying to get a good picture of their baby or child (or anyone for that matter).

Turn off the flash.

(The button usually looks like a lightning bolt, and the OFF mode usually has a ghostbusters sign on top of the lightning bolt.)

There are at least 2 reasons for this:

1. The highlights on the face are often too bright, and unflattering.
2. If anything behind the subject is close to the subject at all, there will usually be a harsh shadow of the subject cast on that surface (like the wall or blanket right behind them).
3. This is more subtle, but light directly from the front flattens out the subject’s face.  Light from the side or 3/4 side gives the face some subtle shape that is (subconciously, at least) more pleasing to look at.

Instead of using the flash in a dark room, put your subject close to a window that doesn’t have direct sunlight coming in.  Don’t use the window as a backdrop, though (tip for another time, maybe).  You’ll probably want to keep most or all of the window out of the picture for starters, but use it as a light source to illuminate the subject’s face.  Nice soft light.

If you have any questions or ideas for tips, please leave them in the comments section!  Or just let us know how these work out for you.  We’d love to hear feedback.