Photographing kids, need some pointers

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Pezza4u

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Rich
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A relative has a 2 and 1/2 year old, plus a 10 month old. Everytime I see them I've been taking some photos for her to keep of them. The problem I'm now finding is they never keep still and alot of my shots are out of focus as they move just as I press the shutter! :lol:

One example is they were on a toy rocking horse, the youngest in front of the eldest. The former was in focus, the later sadly wasn't :bang: It's these kind of photos I need to improve on.

I had the focus set to single, should it be continuous so it tracks their movements? The only thing with this is I thought it might refocus to somewhere I don't want it to.
 
Focus isn't the issue, depth of field is. You need a a bigger DOF to have both subjects in focus. Get up to f8 or 11 and see if it's any better, then of course the amount of light getting in will slow the shutter and you'll get blurry shots as a result. If you have flash I'd say this is the time to use it. Taking pictures of my 19 month old on the swing I focus at the height of he swing and then wait for her to come back to that place each time. Rocking horse will work the same. Picture of them going backwards will probably look a bit weird anyway in my opinion. Hope I've helped, good luck.
Ps, if the older one is old enough to take bribes to sit still you can do that too!
 
have to agree with CJ on the depth of field. because things happen so quickly, i found that i tend to have the wrong object in focus. this is especially obvious when using a lens with a large aperture, f2.8 and below. i would recommend that you stay safe, go for something like f4 or f5.6 so you can get a decent shutter speed. shoot wide, then crop in. =)
 
This is the problem with kids, you either have to use more DOF which usually means using a lot of light, or takes lots of shots to get keepers.

I like using a shallow DOF and will shoot around f2.0 quite often, but I am shooting bursts of 3 to 5 shots every time I press the shutter at 8fps. Be prepared to get much fewer keepers with kids and moving babies.
 
With young kids keep down low with them, find a toy or book of interest and sit down with them and build up a little rapport, read the book with them then smiles will be easier to come by.

For action shots I use manual mode and pick a focus point as mentioned by CJ above

All the above is great advice and I love photographing kids they are great subjects. Just remember to have fun at the same time.
 
Thanks for the tips everyone, I'm seeing them again tomorrow so will have another go :)
 
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