Baby Steps

Kel Kyle entered the waters of her first child portrait session with a lot of flexibility and the bokeh benefits of her Tamron SP 60mm F/2.0 lens.

Article By Jennifer Gidman

Images by Kel Kyle

That’s the situation that Georgia photographer Kel Kyle found herself in when a friend asked the somewhat newly minted photographer to shoot a portrait session of her 10-month-old son, Grayson. Although Kel was initially nervous taking on an unfamiliar genre, she found that establishing rapport, allowing the child to become comfortable in his environment, and simply going with the flow — along with using her newly acquired Tamron SP 60mm F/2.0 macro lens, which can achieve a picture angle equivalent to a 93mm lens on a full-frame DSLR or 35mm film SLR — went a long way to help her attain portrait success and capture just the right moments with Grayson.

“This was for a friend of mine I had worked with for a number of years,” says Kel. “She moved back to Alabama, had Grayson, and now was coming back for a visit. She had seen my pictures on Facebook and said, ‘I really want you to take pictures of my baby.’ It was the first time I would be shooting people — I’m more acclimated to photographing animals. I was really new to the DSLR at that point, but how do you say no to that kind of request from a friend? It was intimidating and a little nerve-wracking, but I wanted to make sure I did it right and was able to give her a good print.”

Kel learned child portraiture on the job, starting from the point when her friend showed up with Grayson. “She brought Grayson to my friend Jo’s house, where a group of us used to have a game night,” she says. “Grayson had slept most of the way, so he was well-rested when he got there. Immediately after she came in, though, I started taking pictures. I have some shots where he was just waking up and trying to figure out who this strange person was putting this big thing in his face!”

Changing up her strategy, Kel put her camera down and got to know her new guest. “With the camera in your face, you do lose the interaction to a certain extent,” she explains. “It was a strange environment for him, and he needed to get comfortable. Once he settled in and I had established a little bit of a relationship with him, I picked the camera back up again. When he got a little cranky, Jo pulled out a few little plastic ducks from her kitchen to give him something to play with and distract him.”

Because she knew that a roster of formal poses wasn’t in the cards, Kel let Grayson take the lead. “He’s 10 months old and wants to be everywhere, so it was hard to keep him in one place,” she says. “The camera was basically glued to my face for about an hour and a half as I just followed him around. It was cool because I could just be a part of what he was doing and capture his world. I just kept that 60mm lens on my camera. I hadn't been around a child that small for a long time — and believe me, it was a workout. It was fun but exhausting. You do need to keep your energy up when you’re photographing kids!”

Continuing the interactions with children this young is crucial, even after they’ve become accustomed to the click of your camera. For the black-and-white shot of Grayson shown here, he was hanging out over his mother’s shoulder while Kel kept his attention. “I’m pretty much like a big kid,” she confesses. “I kept playing with him and making funny noises to get him to look at me. There was a series of interactions where he turned his head a little bit and had this great expression. All I had to do was click away.”

Incorporating other bystanders or participants into the shot can also elicit unexpected moments. “My friend Ray was there, and he’s just like my big brother,” Kel says. “He just adored Grayson, and they really hit it off — here I had this 6-foot 2-inch guy and this tiny baby hanging out having a great time together!”

Ray began to make noises and hide his face in his hands, when all of a sudden Grayson reached out and grabbed Ray’s finger. “I was leaning on Jo’s dining room table, kind of like a human tripod, trying to get as close as I could without being in their faces,” Kel says. “I was inches away and just taking picture after picture. There were so many great elements in that shot, with the eyes and the hands and the mother watching everything that was transpiring.”

This was Kel’s first handheld capture — and she credits the Tamron 60mm lens and its superfast f/2.0 maximum aperture for allowing her to selectively obscure the background just enough for a creative, eye-catching effect. “The bokeh behind them is perfect, blurring out the background just enough so you can still see Grayson’s mom in the shot,” she explains.

This intimate shot cemented another rule of portraiture Kel has learned from many of her professional photographer friends (many of whom are clients of hers from her other Web site design business). “People are often scared to be that close to other people and get into their space, so beginning photographers may tend to back up too much when they’re taking pictures of a family gathering or picnic, for example,” she says. “Now I see the benefit of getting closer, closer, closer, as my friend Craig Tanner always tells me. In the case of Grayson and Ray, I wasn’t on top of them to the point where they wanted me to get out of their face, but I was still really close. The difference that this proximity makes in capturing candids is amazing. Often in group shots, too, everyone’s doing various activities, but nothing’s really focused upon. Getting in close helps eliminate that.”

Searching for the best light is critical for portraiture. “We had brunch there, so it was probably between 11am and noon,” says Kel. “I was fortunate with the lighting: Jo’s house is set up so that her living room has a nice array of windows in the front, and then she has a connected dining room area where there’s a door that leads out to the patio. That door has glass with windows in it, plus a set of windows behind that. All the drapes were open, and I didn’t use any flash. At times we had the dining room light on, which lent some overhead light. If you’re inside, use any existing windows as much as you can, but if the light isn’t great and the overhead lighting isn’t helping, you can also use flash indoors.”

Perhaps the biggest tip that comes to mind from her first time playing the role of portrait photographer: Make sure you know your camera inside and out. “When you’ve got a child like this with his own mind, you have to be concentrating on him, not on your equipment,” she says. “If you don’t have to think about what’s going on with your camera, that frees you up to focus on what’s going on around you and what you can capture. At the time I shot Grayson, I didn’t know my camera that well yet, which made it more challenging, but I was really fortunate that Ray kept Grayson’s attention and got him to focus on him for that moment. Now I wouldn’t be in that same position, because I’m so much more familiar with my camera.”

Kel decided to convert the image to black and white in post-processing. “I really thought it looked wonderful that way,” she says. “His eyes are so big and beautiful — he’s so friendly, and he looks it here.”

The best critic of the photo shoot and resulting images turned out to be Grayson himself. “The great thing was seeing the reaction of Grayson’s mother when she saw these shots, especially the one of Grayson and Ray,” Kel says. “I put a black-and-white image of this on a coffee mug and gave one to each of them. Grayson’s mother said that, months later, when he saw himself on the mug, he got excited and started pointing at himself. Even so much later, he knew it was him!”

For more information on Kel Kyle’s work, go to www.backyardshots.com.