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These are amazing, both the tips and the photos. Lilia Schwartz of Babymoon Photography, has given us permission to reprint the following tips from her blog. We’re taking notes. Boy, is she right about light…

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So, it has come to my attention that not every parent in the world is (or lives with) a professional child photographer.

I find this to be simply SHOCKING! What are you people *thinking*?!?

In all seriousness, I know that, as much as my clients would love to have me following their children around every single day to capture every single cute thing they do (I’ve been asked, though, and it’s awfully flattering! ;-), that’s just not feasible. So, for those 364 days out of the year when you *don’t* have a family photographer, here are a few tips to help you get shots that you love…illustrated by my (almost)daily shots of a kid that *I* love.

No. 1. Pay attention to the light.

This could really be called Number Zero, or A-Number-One-Most-Important-I-Am-Seriously-Not-Kidding-Around-Here-People…photography is about light. Seeing the light. Playing with the light. Figuring out where it is, what it’s doing, and how to use it to make better pictures. Find the light in your home, notice when your kids are playing near the windows (one of my favorite spots is just inside our front door):

Experiment with backlight, with side light…once you’ve ditched your flash (see tip #2), you’ll start finding the spots where you get sweet images that just glow…and you’ll probably find that your child gravitates toward those areas to play. When you’re outside, pay attention to where the sun is, and try to avoid taking pictures when there are harsh shadows on your child’s face (you won’t like the result, I promise).

You’ve probably heard of “The Golden Hour”…that hour just before sunset (or just after dawn), when the light gets all buttery and juicy (yes, this I how I think about light…it makes me salivate)…try going for a walk with your kids and your camera after dinner…see how different the light is from the middle of the day High-Noon-Shootout-On-The-Playground:

You’ll be shocked at the difference in the images (which is why I will almost always push client shoots as late in the day as little schedules will allow – the light is just sooooo much better and we have more flexibility in our locations). If you do end up in a situation with harsh overhead sunlight, you can consider using a fill flash (just about the only time I’ll break my no-on-camera-flash rule), or looking for some open shade.

No. 2. Turn off your flash

On camera flash = pretty much evil. And not just because it gives you those oh-so-attractive I-made-a-deal-with-the-devil red-eye shots. Using your on-camera flash is pretty much guaranteed to kill any spontaneity and naturalness that you might have found in the image. “But I don’t have a fancy dancy $2700 DSLR with a super fast lens!” you say? Well, that’s a pointy point…and I will confess that most of my camera upgrades have been a result of my quest to push my usable ISO value (the equivalent of film speed) up…but, honestly, I find that I’m happier with a grainy (aka noisy) high ISO shot (yes, even from a point and shoot), or an aperture priority shot (when you turn off your flash and tell your camera to shoot as wide open as it can go) that has a bit of motion blur because the shutter speed was waaaaay low.

The image above is a case in point – I shot it back before I had much of a clue about photography, before I even owned a DSLR. I love the image. Love it, in all its unedited, un-color corrected, un-noise-reduced, blurred glory….and not just because it contains a baby in a Star Trek uniform….I love it because it’s the moment, and there’s no distraction of a flash, no harsh light….and my muse was a FAST crawler! I’ll take that shot over one where my flash went off and I have a deer-child in my headlights, startled and grimacing and definitely NOT being all cute and natural like she was just a second ago. So, turn off your flash. Practice having a steady hand, bump up your ISO (or put it on auto), and see what you can see…which brings me to:

No. 3. Get down on (or even below!) their level

It’s a wonderful thing to get down on your child’s level…sit on the floor….even lie down across the carpet…get as low as you can, and shoot up at them…see the world the way they see it, and put them in their own context. It will give you a wonderful perspective on how they see the world every day, and how they fit into their universe.

Now, this is a grain of sand piece of advice, and might actually better be titled Pay-Attention-And-Vary-Shooting-Height-And-Perspective (which our editorial board nixed after heated debate because it really doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, and I really can’t blame them).

I say this because some of my favorite pictures of my muse are from directly above, looking down…it’s often a view of her that I see, and it really speaks to me of her intent engagement with her own world…at her own level. Plus, she’s got these flipping AMAZING eyelashes (don’t they all?!)….which is a neat segue into…

No. 4. Love every bitty bit

When it comes to my muse, I love all her little bits….I love her hands, her feet, her wispy hair (especially wispy beach hair), her eyelashes…even her belly button.

As a parent, you love every grubby, sticky, freckly wonderful bit of your child…so document it. Get the chubby hands, grabbing a crayon for the first time. Get the way he curls his toes around one another when he’s eating spaghetti. And, yes, grab the bare tushie shots as he runs shrieking away from changing table.

In addition to being some amazing blackmail fodder for their teen years, these little closeups will be Exhibit A when you go to make the argument that time goes by WAY too flipping fast. “Freeze her in butter sauce,” is what we say in our house. Every bitty bit.

No. 5. NO CHEESE!!!!

Sometimes, at the beginning of a family session, I’ll be hanging out with a 6 year old who will be laughing and giggling…and, as soon as I pull out my camera, I’ll see a huge change in her expression…for a moment, I’ll worry that she’s in pain…and then I realize, no, it’s just the dreaded “cheese smile.” So I put my camera down and we have a conversation wherein I reveal the shocking secret that You Don’t Always Have To Smile In Photos. SHOCKING, I tell you!!

Please please PLEASE don’t ask your child to say “cheese”…the result is never pretty  (see above)….and more importantly, it’s never *real*…and real, authentic emotion is pretty much essential to a meaningful portrait. A real smile? It’s breathtaking…it makes your heart go pop (even when you’re being lazy and letting your camera choose the autofocus points so her hat is more in focus than her eyes ;-):

I would ten million billion times over rather have a real, serious, contemplative look over a fake smile. If you have a serious kid…let him be serious. Capture him just as he is…and if you want a smile, say or do something funny. Talk to him about his latest obsession (right now, with my Muse, it’s Tom & Jerry). Connect, and document the real moments, as they happen…you’ll treasure the result, I promise…even if there’s no cheese in sight.

And when those *real* smiles appear? No substitution will ever do.

And there you have it…my first 5 tips for taking better pictures of your kids when I can’t be there. I hope that this will be helpful, as you attempt to navigate those perilous professional-less waters of your everyday photographic life.

xoxo,
Lilia

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Babymoon Photography by Lilia Schwartz is modern portraiture for growing families based in Mountain View, California and available to Silicon Valley, the San Francisco Bay Area, and beyond. A day with Lilia is also so astonishingly fun that you forget that you’re also taking photos.

A response to Lisa Belkin’s provocative New York Times Magazine piece: Living to be a Parent. Belkin cites a psychologist, Douglas T. Kenrick at Arizona State University who is undertaking to update Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs pyramid.

Read Belkin’s full article, it’s not long. The upshot is that Kenrick is apparently “redefining ‘self-actualization’ as an indirect means to attracting a mate and, ultimately, parenting children.”

I’m not sure why. Love and belonging is lower on the pyramid. Shouldn’t parenting appear there? In any case, I spent some time today thinking about the provocation Kenrick  (and Belkin) offered. Below is my take. I’m interested in yours.

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On the one hand, it’s an interesting thought experiment to say that parenting a child is at the apex of human “needs” – something that can occur only when our base needs are met.

I can tell you that, as a parent now 3 years “in”, trying to be a good-enough parent is the hardest thing I’ve ever undertaken. (For one thing, what’s good enough?) So, in that sense, coming to terms with yourself, the kind of person you want to be and model for your children, the kind of people you want to raise and the role you as a family might aim to have in society, all while humbly admitting that it’s not actually in your control… all those things feel like a step towards self-actualization to me.

On the other hand, saying that parenting is the target or end-point of any self-actualization aim seems to overstate the role of parenting (while important, it’s not the only thing that’s important!) Is reproduction even really still our goal? With the world population where it’s at, and economics in most societies such that we don’t need our own children to care for us in old age, why is reproduction any sort of imperative at all?

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What do you think?

Maybe it’s because it’s the Jewish new year (that link notwithstanding) a time for reflection. Maybe it’s because of the stuff we’ve been reading online. Whatever it is, I find myself noodling on ethical questions today. Questions like:

Is it ethical for WebMD and Babble.com to have formula makers sponsor their breastfeeding content? I posted this question to Facebook and Twitter and then realized that since I really care what the Parents Guild community thinks about it, I posted it to our Q&A site as well. Feel free to leave me feeedback here, there, or anywhere.

What obligation do community websites have to their community? “I contributed so much to Maya’s Mom, and now it’s gone.”  I heard this recently from someone I respect whom I was hoping might contribute to our site. We’ve now seen the ashes of many a high-flying parenting site – some rocketing through as successes bought out by bigger sites, others disintegrated (like many a startup here in the Valley) as failed business models As a site comprised of community-generated content, it feels like we have an obligation to you, our contributors, our readers – whatever our success path – to not just burn out and disappear. But what then? What’s option C? Have we covered this eventuality already by creative commons licensing our content? Our hope and intention is that the content we all create here will continue on – ideally on this site, which we plan to run for a very long while, and if not, on descendant or sister sites as creative commons licensed content. [You can rest assured that it's top of mind. This post is more about the ethics of community-driven websites in general.]

What are the ethics of sharing emotion in a forum such as this? A recent comment on this blog presented first a moderately informative disagreement with the post, but then continued (not posted) into a bleak angry follow-up comment accusing us of selectively not publishing the first comment, followed a short time later by a third and final comment, a contrite retraction to the effect of “oh, I see, it’s just awaiting moderation.” On the Internet we (all) often type before thinking. Send before proofing. Injure and then regret. When creating a community-generated-content website – especially one focused on close-to-the-heart topics like parenting – what are the ethics of sharing emotion (versus moderating it out?) We want opinions as well as facts, convictions and lively debate; we also want a civil community that diverse folks want to contribute to. What are the ethics of sharing the emotion behind the argument, as a website, as a contributor?