How to take better Christmas Pics

Published: Tue, 12/24/13

How to take better Christmas Pics

In another life, I do wedding photography. Here are ten tips for better pictures this Christmas:

  1. Take more pictures. Delete the bad ones. Keep your camera in your hand, ready to shoot.
  2. Capture the emotion. Look for the smile. Capture the surprise.
  3. Get at eye level, especially with kids. 90% of pics of kids are taken at our level, not theirs. Get on the floor.
  4. Delete the headroom. Frame the picture so the top of the head is near the top of the frame.
  5. Bounce the flash. If you have an external flash, bounce it off the ceiling. Normally you will want to adjust the exposure ON THE FLASH to about +1. (Adjusting the exposure of the camera will have no effect.)
  6. Get closer. Zoom in.
  7. Learn to edit pictures. Almost any picture can be improved. I use Adobe Lightroom for 98% of my editing. Photoshop Elements is 90% of Photoshop at 10% of the cost. There is a bit of a learning curve.

For posed shots:

  1. Get the heads as close together as possible.
  2. Pose the bodies so they are about 45 degrees to the camera. Have the subject face their head right at you. Look at 90% of posed pictures and they are set up this way. (See pic of me to the left.)
  3. Stagger the people. Don’t put a row of people right in front of the next. Instead, stagger them. See the pic of my crew on my Facebook page.

For more info, see my $3 Kindle book, Photography How To.