Advice on Taking Picture for X-mas card

[marn913]

Hi all-
I have a Kodak digital camera and want to take pictures of my 9 month old daughter to put into our Christmas cards this year. I'd like a cute shot with the Christmas tree, and would like it to look as "professional" as possible. Do you have any suggestions on how to light the area or what angles have worked best for you? I'd like the Christmas lights to be obvious, but I don't want the picture to be so dark that you can't see the baby. So far I've tested a couple of different positons. If I put her on the floor in front of the tree, you can't see much of the tree because she's so small. We tried putting a blanket over a small bench and placing to place her higher, but she can fall off easy - so my husband's hands are in the shot holding her up. I thought of putting her back on the floor with some wrapped presents in order to make it more appealing - but that's about all I can think of!

Marne

 

[woodlandsparty]

Its always hard to photograph babies! I would maybe use a little red wagon and set her in that in front of the tree. Then give her an unbreakable ornament or candy cane to occupy her hands and keep her somewhat still. The wagon will help raise her up to the tree level too. If you don't want to see the wagon, you can always cover that with material first.

You'll need to bring in as much lighting as possible to make the shot good.....just using a flash from your PnS camera will not give you a 'natural' lighting look and it will just be too harsh. Try bring in lamps from around the house....the more light the better. Also try to shoot at a time of day when you have the most natural light filling the room.

 

[cvrapclark]

I saw a real cute pic of a baby about that age with just a diaper cover on and a Santa hat and a strand of large Xmas lights kind of wrapped around him like he had gotten tangled up in them. They had it in black and white and a blanket backdrop. They really turned out cute!!! I don't know where they got the lights from but they were like real oversized bulbs.

 

[WillCAD]

Forget the backdrop, beyond a simple red/green motif.

This is a picture of a 9 month old kid, not a picture of a Christmas tree or fireplace or anything else - zoom up on the kid until she fills the frame. In fact, zoom up on her from the waist up. You can dress her in a Christmas outfit, maybe add reindeer antlers or a Santa hat, but zoom up on what you really want to see, the kid.

 

[Groucho]

I would lean towards presents in the background. The tree will be difficult to see unless you have the camera pretty much on the floor looking up, and even then, it would fairly tricky to make a decent photo from that.

Raising her up on a bench or whatnot and framing to hide the bench might look odd, like she's floating in mid-air.

My son was nine months old last Christmas and we never tried to take TOO nice a picture (this was before my DSLR ) but he had a cute Santa outfit. At that age, if you can get them to sit on their butt and look at you and smile for a photo, it's pretty satisfying, Anything beyond that is virtually impossible!

This is probably the best photo we got of him, and it's really not very good IMHO (and needs some noise reduction done):

There's another funny one of him after the presents have been opened, where he's trying to eat some of the wrapping paper, it looks like he's barfing green paper. We didn't put that one online...........