Photographing Baby
There seems to be a baby-boom among my friends and colleagues. So as an avid photographer — and father of an 8 month old — I get a lot of questions about photographing babies.
For posterity here are some of the frequently asked questions, in the hope that someone else might find them useful. If you have better answers, or alternative ideas, leave a response.
What do you use for photo hosting?
I use Google Photos for hosting and sharing albums with family and friends. While this choice was mostly for legacy reasons, it suits me well. Comments are still in G+, so I’m not sure what the future holds for them and whether they’ll be lost at some stage.
All phone photos and videos are synced to Dropbox, for easy portability and sharing with Tessa.
And, of course, Instagram.
What camera do you use?
I have a quite a few cameras, but my workhorse is a Canon 5DmkIII. I’ve used it so much, I barely need to think. If you aren’t already shooting an SLR I’d probably recommend a mirrorless camera like the Sony A5100.
I make sure to keep it lying around, so it’s close at hand, and I never have to think about switching into dedicated photo-taking mode.
Honestly, though, no matter what, your phone will likely be your primary camera. It’s always with you and the latest iPhones and Androids are pretty great. For crazy-wriggly-baby I’ve found the iPhone burst mode indispensable.
What are your top lenses?
My default lens these days is the 16–35mm f/2.8, second is a 50mm f/1.4.
What settings do you use?
Spot metering. High ISO so you can keep the speed up. Burst mode. Move focusing points so you don’t have to move the camera, focus on the eyes.
What software do you use?
Adobe Lightroom. I was already quite familiar with it, so it doesn’t take much time to upload, cull, tweak, and upload. Time will be such a scarce resource that if anything is time consuming you just won’t do it. So keep it familiar and simple.
Sounds like you take a lot of photos, how do you keep up?
We still haven’t gone through all our wedding photos. So I was aware that it’d be all too easy to let the thousands of photos pile up and remain unshared. And since our families are both far away I really wanted to avoid that.
In the first few weeks I uploaded a photo a day, and it was “against the rules” to use a photo from the previous day. This helped form the habit, now I do it a couple of times a week. I dropped a full album every month, for the first 6 months, but am now doing it every three.
Do you back up your photos?
Three weeks before my Masters dissertation was due my hard drive crashed. Since then I’ve been massively paranoid about data loss.
I store several months of photos on my laptop, older photos live on an external hard drive using RAID1 to protect from disk failure. Both locations are backed up using Time Machine to a 2nd external drive.
On top of this, I have CrashPlan backing up to the cloud and a Drobo 5N network drive.
Hopefully I’m covered.
Anything else?
I really like the 1 Second Everyday app. I’ve been doing it a couple of years now, but now it’s basically 1 second of Lyra everyday. It’s amazing how otherwise mundane moments can be enchanting in aggregate.
Oh, this is unrelated to cameras, but you should probably catch up on sleep. ’cause that’s never gonna be the same.
