If you have a new baby and your like I was with my daughter, your taking snapshots every time the baby has a new expression on its cute little face.

If you would like to learn how to improve your pictures and get the kind of pictures your friends and family will ooooh and ahhhh over you've come to the right place.

Here's what you need to get started.

1. A camera, film or digital is fine
   
2. A large sunny window. North facing is best
   
3. A solid colored blanket
   
4. A boppie type pillow
   
5. A baby or child. For the sake of this tutorial I'll be using one of my daughters baby dolls. If your baby is now grown and you still want some nice pictures of your child, you can still use this technique, and you will have great results (just keep taking pictures until you get what you like)
   

Step One:
Simple is better. When dressing baby for her photo shoot you need to keep it simple, avoid clothes with patterns. Solid soft colors look best in pictures, a Diaper only picture is my favorite way to take pictures, just skin looks timeless and beautiful. For today's lesson, we are going to use the clothes on the right because as you can see the clothes on the left, while cute are distracting.



Step two:
A nice big window with lots of indirect light coming in. A sliding glass door works well or a large window in your living room, maybe your bedroom is better. If you can try and use a north facing window, the light will be softer and you will have better results. But use what you have. I happen to have a north facing window so here is my floor with a nice big patch o'sunshine.



Step Three:
Turn your flash off. If your flash will not turn off cover it with a white piece of paper and tape. Your goal is soft natural light. Set your camera to Portrait Mode (wide aperture, fast shutter speed).

Step Four:
Lay your Solid Colored Blanket on the floor in the nice sunny patch, avoid busy patterns on the blanket, this will only distract your attention away from the baby. Below I flipped my normally beautiful quilt over so that the solid white would look better and less busy.




Step Five:
Lay baby on the blanket so that baby's body is parallel to the sunshine and one side of the body has soft shadows. On the left I placed baby with her feet pointing to the sun, this gives creepy shadows and really does not make baby look nice, On the right, I placed baby with her left side to the sun, this gives much nicer shadows and don't you think it just look 100% better?



Step Six:
The single best tip I can give you. Get close to your baby, 3 feet or closer, get low too, try to be eye level with baby, Try faming the entire face in your camera. Try to avoid the picture on the left, Instead get close like the picture on the right.



Step Seven:
Try different poses, a hand by the face is sweet, tummy, on back holding feet (always cute) Nestled in a boppie (cover with the solid blanket first)



Step Eight:
Take lots and lots of pictures, the more you take the more "keepers" you will have for your baby book.

Step Nine:
Send your pictures to a great lab for prints your grandkids will love, I use MPix. and PhotoWorks does a great job as well. Unless you have a top of the line printer I don't recommend that you do the printing yourself. Remember you want people to ooooh and aaaaah over your pictures so spend the .19$ and get top grade photographs.

Well that's the end folks, If you have any questions please feel free to ask. I'll be happy to help in anyway I can. If any of you decide to try this out, Please post a picture here for us to see how well you did.
Thanks for reading my post!!

But dont you want to capture what your baby is like, not what it was like after edited with photoshop or wheteva, nice idea but I would hate to do this

nice tutorial... I'm always interested in taking cool pix of me and my friends, and it's kinda neccessary to touch up and alter with photoshop...

Photographic realists (people who want photographs to depict things exactly as they are) don't want to edit their photos with a computer, but you can create really artistic scenes from digital pictures even if you aren't super artistically gifted.

anyways, good job on the tutorial. Keep up the good photoing...

That's really a cool way to take pictures. I really like the ones that you made. It probably would take some practice though working with the sunlight and what not. Who needs to pay $60 for pictures of your kids when you can take them at home. I would probably edit them myself in Photoshop and just print them out here at my home with some photo paper.

Perhaps there is a misunderstanding, Not every person with a digital camera automatically buys Photoshop or some other editing software. I for one do not own the program. The above pictures are as they came from my camera.

The same technique can be used with a film camera as well. I have been a photographer for 18 years and I used this natural light technique so many times I can't even begin to count. I love the way natural light looks on people and I hope who ever is out there saying that you have to edit your digital pictures, will stop because they are simply mistaken.

Now, I’m not saying that editing your pictures is wrong, because it’s not. And to those people who think film is superior, when you have your film developed, they adjust (i.e. edit) the exposure, saturation, sharpness, color. Just like someone who uses editing software for digital pictures. The only difference is, the digital pictures are easier to manipulate and take to an entirely different artistic level.

Wow, I didn’t know that hit a nerve with me, Sorry if I’m preachy. I’ll get off my soap box now.

I hope I cleared that up a little.
Good luck and happy picture taking.

P.S. For those of you who want to use this for adults as well, go for it, I think you will be very happy with what you get, and thank you all very much for the compliments, This was my very first Tutorial. I'm thrilled with all the positive responses. Thanks again.

Most digital cameras come with a photoshop CD, I got mine years ago and got Photoshop Elements 2.0 which can do most things

Do you use your camera a lot? Do you prefer Digital to Film? What camera do you own?

I shoot with the Olympus E500, (digital) I have several lenses and I love it. Before that I had a Nikon F3 (film)
I love the pictures I get from both of them, and I find that I have no need for programs like photoshop. I just send my image files to my printer (mpix.com) and they print them for me and send them a few days later I have beautiful photographs that look every bit as good as my 35mm prints.

Everyone has a preference and that's great. I would like to encourage you to do a little research about digital photography, I think you might find that it isn't all fake.

hey jennifer, ive been taking a ton of pictures of my daughter since she was born (shes 3 weeks today) and i have to say, while posed pictures are nice, the "candid" pictures are even better, they really seem to capture the true babyness (if thats a word) of her, and even when it comes to pictures of older people, pictures taken unexpectedly always seem to turn out the best

oh and becuase im fairly sure youll ask this, i use my camera tons, i dont have much experience with film cameras (aside from disposable) and i have a kodak easyshare c300, which really is easy

Good tutorial, I'm sure it will be useful to many people with babies.
I don't use a camera lots. I have a digital camera, and prefer digital over film.

I have albums full of candid shots and they are my favorite, because they capture the moment. You can use the above tut. To take candid shots of your baby, play with baby in the light by a window and have someone take the pictures, while you and baby are being yourself.

The goal of this tutorial was not how to take candid shots of your baby; it was how to take Pro-Quality pictures. I'm glad many of you find it helpful.

Many of my clients ask me, “how do you do it?" so I made this tutorial to show them how I did it. And they all are very excited that they can take nice pictures of baby, at home and don't have pack up the baby and come to the studio to get great pictures, they still come to me for studio work, but they are having fun taking pictures at home too.

What ever camera you use, film or digital, makes no difference to me, as long as you realize that digital pictures are every bit as good as film.

I can't help but be offended when someone tells me that because I shoot digital, then I'm not a real photographer. I'm sorry but that is sooooooo archaic. I've shot both and I prefer digital, it’s much less expensive and the quality is every bit as good at film. Sometimes even better!

Okay I did it again, I’ll stop now... sorry.

Take care all.

Intresting, although I think that I can safely say that I'll proabbly never use this tutorial.

I have switched to shooting entirely in camera raw. What is the advantage? You get all the digital information the sensor collects. Then when you process the photo you can adjust the settings like color cast, white balance, brightness and sharpness. You can't change the focus, so you still need ...more

Post your Counter-Strike Picture/Screenshots here. Weather they are from Counter-Strike 1.6, Condition Zero, or on Source. I'll post mine: I don't know why I did this, on my CS:S server. I was bored. ...more

I'm basically looking for a decent point and shoot camera that will let me have manual control over most(if not all) of the operations: Focus, ISO, shutter speed, aperture, ev compensation, white balance, etc. Maybe some brand names that allow this? My current point and shoot ...more