No More Boring Holiday Family Photos – Five Tips From The Pros



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Give the kids some time to be kids.

Give the kids some time to be kids.

I have a prediction that, in the next few weeks, Twitter, Instagram, and Flickr are going to be flooded with tens of thousands of really bad holiday family photos. There will be the police lineup, with family arranged in a line like the usual suspects in Casablanca. There will be the dreaded “hug and mug” of someone holding a cell phone camera at arm’s length while they side-hug someone. There will be sullen children who would rather be something- anything else so they make themselves look as uncomfortable as any human can look outside of a CIA torture prison or Siberian gulag.

There are two major problems with boring holiday photos: One is that no one wants to look at them and they tend to get forgotten and lost. The other problem is that they don’t tell you anything about the people in the photo. You know who all the people in the photo are, but who will know in 20, 40 or 60 years? I looked at a group photo of my parents in the 40s and didn’t know half the people in the shot. A family photo should say something about where the photo was taken and the relationship of the people involved. A great family photo and capture the flavor of the moment and give the viewer a peek at the character of the people in the shot.

Magic doesn’t happen by accident, so here are five tips from the pros for getting interesting holiday photos.

Get Elevation For Group Shots

Get a step ladder, climb some steps or go up on an outdoor balcony, anything to get yourself a little elevation. In ground-level group shots the faces in the back tend to get lost unless you have the people in front scrunch down. There’s also a bonus to having people look up as it stretches the skin of their face enough to hide the sags and minor imperfections of age. You don’t want to be too high up, perhaps a first floor balcony at the very most.

Group People Logically

Who are these people?  There's no way to tell who belongs with one another.

Who are these people? There’s no way to tell who belongs with one another.

Below are two shots of the same group. The first one they just packed in on their own and you can’t tell who belongs together. Are all the kids in the same family or more than one? You can guess the older people in the photo belong together but that’s about it.

The second photo is more illustrative. You get that the kids belong to the couple on the right, along with the age order. The girl in the white shirt and guy in the black go together and the two guys in the back row look enough alike to guess they’re brothers. We moved one of the subjects to another photo so the odd pair wouldn’t look like another couple. Enough of the background shows that you can tell where the photo was taken. That’s a nice group shot that tells a story.

 

 

Much better.  Now you can tell who belongs together, even if you didn't know the people in the photo.

Much better. Now you can tell who belongs together, even if you didn’t know the people in the photo.

Photograph The Kids Separately First

The group photos will go better if you shoot pictures of the kids separately and give them a chance to act out. It also will let their true personalities bubble to the surface and capture clues to the nature of family relationships. Besides, when you get a good group of kids it’s really a lot of fun to work with them.

Give the kids time to be kids and the whole day will run a lot more smoothly.

Use a Fill Flash Outdoors

People tend to use their camera flashes at the wrong time. They’ll turn it on indoors, where a camera’s built-in flash becomes the worst photographic lighting in the history of the craft. Then the camera turns the internal flash off outdoors where it would actually do some good.

Use a fill flash outdoors to get some light on people’s eyes. Eyes look more alive with catch lights and it will brighten up the colors on your subjects.

Have Some Fun

It’s hard for people to stand around and pose so getting them to laugh, joke around, make faces and enjoy the moment will give you more time to get the prize winning shots. Another trick is to schedule the shoots far enough in advance of departure time that people aren’t looking at their watches while you’re organizing.

If your group includes older people, get them a chair or something to lean on for support, that will give you more time and a focal point for grouping your subjects.

With a little bit of planning and organizing you can not only take pretty good group shots, but you’ll have photos that people will understand 40 years from now.