Hi everyone! Polly Crystal here today to share some tips and photos, to hopefully encourage you all to capture the details of your everyday. I know we all love sweet smiling photos of our cutie kids and grand kids and nieces and nephews…etc. There is so much more to our story than those sweet faces though! So much more to THEIR story. Our lives are made up of little details of this and that. Regular things that we more than likely will not remember but will be so fun to look back on one day! When I look at the super old photos of distant relatives that my mother has I can’t help but wish there was more than those faces. Little things that could help me to know them better and could help me to compare our personalities and things. Learning how to take photos of the details will help immensely with pocket scrapping as well when you are feeling a wee bit burnt out and wondering what to photograph next.
- Zoom in and use depth of field to highlight the subject matter. If you look at this photo I bet you know exactly what my sweet girl does every time she goes outside. This is literally what she presents to me multiple times every day! It’s always either some kind of soup or food that I have to eat or something she wants me to ooh and ahh over and display. Dirty fingernails and all make this so perfect! This is Summer at for me! Zooming (or walking towards the subject if you have a fixed lens) will create a beautiful depth of field (blurry background) and will highlight exactly what you want.
- Zoom out to capture the details of the environment. In the same way that you can zoom in to capture the close up details, zooming out captures soooo much more of the environment and better shows what is happening in the moment. I love doing this when the kids are smaller-ish especially. It really shows how small they are in a great big world and how sometimes an easy hike for us, is quite the feat for those small legs.
- Focus on an item of great importance with the person in the background. Everyone has favorites of some kind. Favorite books, favorite toys, favorite foods, favorite everything! One fun thing to do that does keep your cuties in the frame, is have your camera or your cell phone camera focus on the ITEM and not their face. Cameras almost always want to focus on a face because most people do capture portraits. You might have to manually make your camera or phone focus on the item itself, but doing this is such a fun way to really capture a love of the child and also still get you precious photo of them.
- Change your perspective. If you are used to just standing in front of your subject, try switching it up! Go off to the side or look down from above! Both of these photos say soooo much about what is happening in the moment and you can’t focus on the faces. That is so much fun! The details of the day are what you notice and focus on.
- Don’t worry about cropping! So often we are told that if you crop off certain parts of a person while taking a photo, that the photo is ruined. This is sooooo not true! It is all up to interpretation of course, but I don’t mind a little cropping in order to capture the details of the moment. This is one of my all time favorite photos in the history of ever. It so perfectly captures my girl and how great she is at being a big sister. I love the movement shown here and the contact between the both of them. She was teaching him somersaults and I just grabbed my camera and shot as quickly as I could and I adore it. Crop away if you have to! I promise that it won’t ruin your photos if the moment was special!
- Embrace imperfection and emotions. My camera is super old and takes HORRIBLE photos at night. They are grainy and dark or blurry. When hubby was tickling Jasper and the giggles were so loud it made me come in from the other room, I had to not worry about it and capture that moment and those details. This photo is pure love. So much love that I cry when I look at it too long. If you zoom in it’s really grainy. I had to boost the highlights which lost some of my image quality, but I do not even care. If a moment makes you feel something, it is worth snapping a photo no matter how imperfectly it will turn out!
I so hope that was helpful and inspired you all to try to take some detail shots for your pages and albums! They really are so so so special and will be such a treasure for your loved ones when you are gone.
Leave a Reply