Your demeanor is everything when you approach children to photograph them. You just got to go in there just loving what you’re doing. If it’s your own children, you may get a little bit of a different response because they’re probably used to you running around with the camera taking pictures of them all day.
When you photograph children, just have a really great attitude, upbeat, and try not to get right in their face. Let them relax at first and then start photographing. Warm them up a little bit, and then just increasingly get more technical with them as far as posing and things. It tends to work on most children.
You’ll always get one or two kids that are more difficult to pose than others, that are a little bit more resistant to those techniques that we just spoke about. But for the most part, the attitude is everything in photographing people. If you tend to have a lighthearted, fun approach, loving what you’re doing; that kind of an attitude, that rubs off on people and I think they really appreciate it.
Also, think of in terms of what you’re trying to portray or get across to the viewer. If it’s a photograph of a child, very often we’ll get them to look straight at the camera and take the picture. Experiment with having the subject not looking right at the camera, maybe off to the side or even not at the camera at all.
Let them do what they do best, which is having fun, and just try to get candids with a few serious ones towards the end looking at the camera. They don’t necessarily need to be smiling every time, but just gazing into the camera like they were looking at a parent or a loved one. Then always throw a few smiling ones in there, too, just for fun.