Recently, a few friends of mine have each bought a new lens (the 50mm f/1.8) because I suggested that it would be a great step for them to take as mamas wanting to take better photos of their kiddos.  I have the 50mm f/1.4, and it is lives on my camera about 90% of the time.  It’s a great lens.  (If anyone has a spare $1500 lying around and wants to surprise me with the f/1.2, that would pretty much rock my world. )  Anyway, it has been really fun help them as they are figuring out settings and how to use their equipment.  None of them have any intention of professionally getting into photography; they all just want to know how to get good results for their day-to-day family photos, which is pretty fab reasoning in my book!

Yesterday, I got an email from one of the girls asking the following question and thought I’d share it here (with her permission, of course!):

Ok, so I’m sending you a picture I took of Kate the other day. Do you have any tips about hats and the shadows they produce while taking pictures? I love this picture, but am not crazy about the shadow.  What do you do?

You may recognize this cutie pie from a recent session I had.  Love her.  🙂  Here is what I responded to the question:

Ok, photo-wise, I’m loving lots of things about this one.  She’s a little off-center (I like that), you’ve narrowed your aperture (so we focus on her and not everything else in the photo), good exposure, etc.  Hats can be tricky.  To avoid getting half of her face shadowed, you have two options, but both involve moving her a little.  One is called “back lighting”.  In order to back-light, you make sure the sun (or light source) is totally BEHIND your subject.  This is kind of impossible in the middle of the day when the sun is directly overhead, but can be achieved at most other times pretty easily.  By putting Kate’s back to the sun,  you eliminate any direct sunlight from being on her face.  Therefore, there won’t be a big light/dark line on her face.  In this photo, it looks like the sun is to her left.  If she rotated 90 degrees to her right, it probably would look totally different.  Your only other option would be to slide her over into the shade (the edge of it is the best), so that she, again, wouldn’t have any direct sunlight on her face.  Make sense?

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I know my readers primarily consist of mamas, so I had a feeling that you might find yourself in this exact same situation.  Even if you are using a normal point-and-shoot camera (IE, a camera you don’t change the lenses on), the exact same suggestions still apply– move or rotate your subject so no direct sunlight hits his/her face.  It will make a world of difference.  When you start paying attention to little things like this, you’ll start to notice a change in your photos.  It’s kind of amazing. 🙂