How To Photograph A Moving Baby – Baby Photography Tips And Lighting Techniques

Now if you’re ever scratching your head, while struggling to capture newborn beauty, then just relax… you just need to follow a couple of easy steps, and you’ll soon be struggling to put your camera away.

Really the main problem when photographing babies, is how to deal with movement, and even though a lot of digital cameras come prepared with a “Children Mode” setting, it will only present us of lighting problems…. so a manual setting unfortunately is not going to get the quality results we were looking for.

So, today we are going to explore the best way to capture perfect skin tone in low light conditions, whether indoors or outside. Let’s take a look at the following photography scenario of a baby outdoors in soft lighting conditions, so I would set my digital camera with a lower f stop, like an f/4 (this will help to softly blur out any background), with a higher ISO setting like 800 (this will help the sensor locate all additional light), and finally to counteract any movement we need to set the shutter speed to about 1/160.

It goes without saying that outdoors we normally manage to find enough light on a clear day, but indoors is a different scenario, so let’s go back to our digital camera, and explore the “White Balance” setting as the perfect tool to capture perfect indoor baby photos, especially if they are clothed in pale colors, when it’s well recommended to open your camera’s white balance adjustment and manually set it to an indoor setting. You see, even if you have overhead lighting, it will only reflect off bright colors, so on the other hand, the baby is clothed in bright shiny colors the light will reflect, although you will need to check your light meter readings to get the perfect result.

Knowing when to use or turn off the flash can also be a bit tricky to start with, but the general rules are the following. If the baby has the sun or an artificial light source directly behind, then we already have enough light to capture perfect skin tone, and using the flash would just counteract the light source, and we would lose those perfect skin tones. On the other hand if we are photographing a baby indoors, then we often have the chance to use the flash to our advantage, but don’t get too close up or you’ll end up with either reduced tough accents, flattening shadows, or a generally poor effect image.


Above we see a newborn in a everyday indoor lighting situation, but we can also observe that the camera fired a flash from a appropriate distance away. This flash is certainly highlighting the subtleties that we need to see and not washing out any part of the photo. Had the camera been closer to the toddler it could have produced tough accents, flattening shadows, and a generally poor effect. One problem that can emerge from indoor flash photography are harsh shadows, which can quite easily be removed afterwards, if you have access to a program like Adobe Photoshop. But to avoid those problems in the first place, you could try bouncing the flash off the top of the ceiling, and this will produce a warmer lighting effect over the entire shot. Another method often used by professional photographers is to place a small golden reflector right behind the baby (but not to be seen though the viewfinder), and this will make the light bounce off, and your baby images will be void of any shadows.


Okay, let’s move away from light now, and learn a few more tricks to take better baby photography, so first off let’s discuss a few of the different angle options you have for photographing a baby. To begin with try getting down low to their level, though this particular angle does present some challenges for the overall focal length, but I find that by using a 24-105 zoom, you will end up with a great picture. You will obviously be wanting to take a couple of close up shots, and you can do this by either physically moving in or by just using a longer focal length.

Now if your want to get really close up to your baby, and capture some of the finer details or a single body part (such as a hand, an ear, a foot, a mouth and so on), then you may not know that your camera has a great setting called the “macro mode”. So activate that setting on your camera, and just use the viewfinder to determine that right distance to shoot from, and you will produce some really amazing baby portrait photos.

Moving babies is something we may have to be dealing with more and more as they get older, so another good way to not miss any of the action is to just keep shooting in continuous mode. Just keep clicking, while looking through the viewfinder, and you can be sure to capture of their first movements and actions, and remember to use the video too, so you can always remember their first noises and words.

Finally, when you review your images on a PC or other device, you may just want to rescue a few of the poorer images by removing the color, and it really does works well with baby photography. Why? Well, itís perfect for dealing with scratches, marks and blotches as they are hardly visible as black and white images. Another method to get a similar effect is by de-saturating the colors in your shots slightly, and just leave a little color in your shots. This will give a more pastel color effect to the images, producing beautiful soft images, which will certainly find a place in any baby photo album.

Anyway this is Mike Chase signing off, and I really do hope you’ve enjoyed these tips to take better baby photos, and to read more, just “CLICK HERE” or you can bookmark “MY PHOTOGRAPHY BLOG” for future reference…. Thanks!