by Gary Cain

Created on: March 17, 2009   Last Updated: March 22, 2009

Want to take better photographs of your child and have fun while you're doing it? Replace the old "one and done" single shot approach and stage your own extended photography session with your child. Think of it as your own press conference with your child as the glamorous Hollywood star at the grand opening of his or her hit movie.

Feeling limited to taking one photograph at a time should be a thing of the past now that inexpensive digital photography has largely replaced costly film. The memory cards in today's digital cameras allow an essentially unlimited number of pictures to be easily taken and transferred to a computer for printing. With the cost of taking pictures no longer an issue, why not take advantage by taking lots of photos in your own shooting session?

Photographic magic happens by giving your child his or her favorite toy and letting the child do what comes naturally while you snap away with your digital camera. By taking a dozen or more pictures over just a few minutes, you'll be amazed at how many fun and playful shots you get. These photos will be much better than stiff, unnatural, posed photos and will reveal much more of what your child is really like.

To give your images more impact, get close so the child will fill the photographic frame. If you have a zoom lens, zoom it out all the way, both to make your child much more prominent in the photo, and to make the background less distracting.

For one such session I took pictures of my younger daughter, Roxanne, over maybe 15 minutes, probably two dozen shots in all. As a young baseball fan, she was wearing her favorite team's colors and I gave her a bright pink toy bat to play around with. In addition to striking several spontaneous baseball poses, Roxanne also found the bat to make a nice Pinocchio nose. After examining the resulting photos, several were definitely keepers which really revealed her personality at that age. My wife and I liked the series so much that we had the best five shots printed and custom matted together for display. The non-keeper images were simply discarded.

Your child will have a blast being the center of attention, getting to play with a favorite toy, and then helping pick the best of the resulting photos to print. You'll enjoy being a new member of the paparazzi and observing your child's enthusiastic modeling. Best of all, you'll get several memorable photos illustrating this stage of your child's life.

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