More than snapshots

About a year ago I saw the book Your Baby in Pictures: The New Parents Guide To Photographing Your Baby’s First Year at Barnes & Noble. It intrigued me at the time and when I knew we would be adding Boyo to the family I knew I wanted to pick up that book — particularly after I got a digital SLR.

As it’s turned out it’s been a really useful title to have for the past two months and given me a lot of ideas about things to photograph that I might not have otherwise thought of. I definitely recommend it for any parent who’s interested in capturing details of their baby’s first year whether they have an SLR or not. For me because I enjoy photography, I definitely wanted to do it with an SLR but the author gives suggestions if you’re using a point and shoot camera as well.

For Christmas my husband and his parents got me a 50mm lens, which was the primary one recommended for baby photography in this book and I’ve been loving it. I’ve also found that for the first time things like shutter speed, aperture settings, and ISO settings are making sense to me. This past week I took some photos after Boyo had a bath during the daytime. I opened up all of the windows and so didn’t use a flash on any of these — I lso had the camera set on Manual so I could experiment and call all the shots!

Settings: f/1.8; 1/30 sec; ISO 800

After the first couple of photos I also changed the shutter speed because he moves around a lot!

Settings: f/1.8; 1/80 sec; ISO 800

Upping the exposure time seemed to help with less blur on the hands and feet, as well as the overall look of the photos — the first were letting in too much light and looked almost washed out as a result.

I’m still figuring out what settings are good for what but I’m definitely getting a better feel for what each helps with and does. And when time is of the essence one can always go back to a default, can’t one? In the meantime, we have fun!