7 Tips for Documenting 'Everyday' Family MomentsFocus on personalities and relationships to transform day-to-day interactions into beautiful visual memories. |
Article by Jenn Gidman Images by Kristi Bonney |
It's easy to take for granted the little things we do with and for our family each day: the chores, the routines, the hustle and bustle of daily life. For Kristi Bonney, those are exactly the moments she wants to capture with her camera. "When I'm taking pictures of my family, I often reflect on what I want to remember when they leave the house one day-what do I want to look back on when they're grown up and have families of their own?" she says. "And I realize that it is all those little moments that I want: how my daughter ran around in the grass with her cape for an hour, how one of my older kids poured milk into my younger ones' cereal, what they look like when they're sleeping. By showing those seemingly mundane moments, you capture the everyday in a beautiful way that's not posed or overstaged." |
Kristi offers insight below into how she uses the Tamron SP 24-70mm VC, the SP 70-200mm VC, and the SP 90mm VC Macro lenses to frame her family the way she wants to remember them for many years to come. |
Show relationships between family members through everyday activities. |
Those were actually my glasses my daughter was wearing. She likes to get really silly sometimes and wanted to put them on, which showed her playfulness. Her position and smile were totally organic: That's her "waiting for my milk to be poured" pose! My kids are used to me taking photos and hovering with the camera, and they'll often ignore me-which is fine, because I love candid photos. But I also like when they interact, give me eye contact, and play it up like my daughter does here. Her great eye contact really captured her personality. |
Don't feel like you always have to show your subjects' faces to convey joy and fun. |
By incorporating a sense of motion into my images, like the pouring of the milk into the cereal bowl or the grains of sand falling through my child's fingers, I'm able to make the image more dynamic. I gravitate toward action shots like that, because I want to remember those little moments-of things that actually happened pretty regularly-forever. |
Convert to black and white when you don't want colors to distract from the real focus of your image. |
Using a fast lens like the 24-70 and opening up to F/2.8 really comes in handy in low-light situations like this. The Vibration Compensation feature on that lens helps me lower the shutter speed for the type of images I take in the dead of night! |
Capture each family member in their environment to let their personality shine. |
One of the things about childhood that I'm set on capturing is that carefree spirit of "I'm not affected by the world yet and just want to run and play and laugh and smile and life is so great." I took this picture with the 70-200 of my 5-year-old daughter playing in our yard because I love the compression on that lens and the way it so phenomenally blurs the background so the focus is on my daughter. She tends toward bright colors like that red cape and boots, which bring out her personality and convey that unabashed joy I was talking about. By composing the shot showing her coming into the frame, it anticipates the running, skipping, twirling, and wanting to fly with her cape in the air that she's about to do, signifying "childhood" and signifying her, because that's still what she's all about. |
Focus on a classic childhood activity by creating a silhouette. |
Even if you rely a lot on autofocus, you'll want to experiment with manual focus in low-light situations like this. It's no big deal, though: What I did to get this shot is simply expose for the background itself, not for the foreground and my subject. By exposing for the sky, I was able to put my daughter in shadow and focus on the outline of her body and the kite. |
Use a macro lens to highlight alluring details in your subjects' faces. |
Experiment with angles and lighting sources to make an ordinary scene look magical. |
You can use anything as a light source when you're shooting in low light like this. The photo that shows my daughter bathed in colorful light is actually light from her iPad. She had fallen asleep watching a movie. I had never thought of using a light like that for one of my images-it was a happy accident! You could get a similar effect with a nightlight or laptop light as your source, letting it simply shine down on your child's face as she's sleeping and letting that soft light accentuate that peaceful, quiet time. |
I zoomed out a little for this photo so I could capture her eyelashes and even her messy hair. You want to embrace everything about your child, even the not-so-perfect stuff-who cares if your child's room is a mess or hair is in her face? Those are the things you'll laugh about down the road. Photograph your family members as they are, because they're each beautiful in their own unique way. |
To see more of Kristi Bonney's work, go to www.kristibonneyphotography.com. |