As a new father of two little boys, I’ve had a lot of practice snapping up those precious moments, and I want to share a few tips with you to help improve the results of your own images. Of course, every rule is made to be broken, so after practicing and internalizing these suggestions, go ahead and try to do something different, or the complete opposite, and I’m sure you’ll get some surprising and exciting results!

This might be obvious to most of us, but our children are usually much shorter than us. Try to go down to their eye-level, so they won’t have to strain their necks looking up, and you won’t miss that million dollar expression. If your infant is just learning to crawl, get down to the ground to capture their expression as they are huffing and puffing, trying to reach for the toy lying across the room. This will work great if you have pets as well.

For me, the purpose of the image is to capture the moment, not only as you see it with your eyes, but also the emotion and the feeling that you experience at that moment. Sometimes you are so caught up in trying to capture your kid doing something new and exciting, that when you look at the image afterwards, it is blurry and the message that you were trying to get across is lost. How do you fix this?

If you are using a point-and-shoot camera, set it to action mode, to give you a better chance of freezing the movement.

If you happen to have a DSLR camera, I would suggest using the (S)butter speed Mode (consult your manual for the precise name of this mode on your camera model) and setting the speed to at least 1/160th of a second, or even faster, if possible. This will ensure that your child’s image is sharp and not blurry. If you are shooting indoors, I would suggest hiking up the ISO setting of your camera to as high as it can go without getting too noisy (by noise I refer to the amount of digital distortion that begins to appear in an image as you raise the ISO.) Some noise is perfectly fine, and can actually be used as a cool effect, but too much noise tends to ruin an image.

I love to simplify my images, so they tell only one story. In order to do this, I try to remove anything from the background that takes focus away from the subject.

There are a few ways to achieve this:

a) Get up close – If you are trying to capture your child’s smile (or her tears), experiment with framing only her face. If her feet, the sofa, or the lighting fixture on the ceiling don’t contribute to the image, avoid having them in the picture.

b) Change your angle – sometimes a slight change of angle, whether it’s to the left or the right or up or down, can make a big difference in what is included in the frame and what is excluded. Try to experiment with the angle that you shoot at to get a different perspective and to avoid cluttering your images.

c) Blur the background – for DSLR shooters – shooting in (A)perture mode and setting it to the lowest possible f number (highest opening), will give your image a nice blurry background effect, known as Bokeh.

4. Place your subject off-centre

This is a big one for me. For some reason or other, images that place their subjects right smack in the middle usually seem very bland. Try framing the image with your child off-centre, leaving more space on one side of the image. This directs the viewer’s eye to the ’empty’ space and makes the image more interesting. This technique is referred to as the ‘rule of thirds’ in composition. I don’t know why this works, but it does (much of the time)!

You may also consider placing your subject in one of the corners of the image, and shoot on a bit of an angle, to get an interesting effect.

As much as possible, try to make sure your child’s eyes are in sharp focus. Whoever said that the eyes are the windows to the soul had a point, at least when it comes to photography. The eyes can convey an expression all on their own, and your image will be more powerful if you can capture that.

Most importantly, have fun interacting with your kids and shoot as much as you can.

I’m happy to share my knowledge with you!

Avital Zemer