As a parent, one of your prime responsibilities is to take rubbish pictures of your children – fuzzy and out of focus, dribble, snot and poo everywhere, jumbled backgrounds – the opportunities for ruining a perfectly good photograph are endless!

Luckily, the invention of the digital camera brought with it the ability to instantly see the photo that you have just taken – this means in theory that you can spot the poor photos, delete them and take another until you get it right.  So why do we still have hard-drives full of average photos.

The solution, fortunately, is simple and if you follow some golden rules, your photos will improve enormously.  I am assuming that you are using your camera on its most idiot-proof automatic mode – this is often marked as P for Programme mode.  This mode leaves all the exposure decisions to the camera and generally, it will do a good job, leaving you to work on the golden rules below.  We can cover more advanced topics like exposure in a later article.

The Golden Rules for better baby pictures:

·        Get in close – this will reduce the distracting background of furniture etc.  Professional portrait-takers use plain backgrounds in order to remove any distractions.  Place baby in front of a plain wall or on a sofa to get a similar effect. 

·         When you are composing the picture, put the camera up to your eye and use the viewfinder rather than using the screen on the back – it is easier to see more detail this way and makes it easier to judge the critical moment to press the shutter button.

·        Focus on the eyes – a good portrait (not a snap any more – you are now taking portraits!) will almost always have the eyes in focus even if other parts of the picture are blurred.  Most auto focus cameras will let you focus by half-pressing the shutter and then allow you to hold that focus setting and compose the picture – try it out – this is a vital skill to learn if you want to get a bit more creative.

·        Take time in composing the picture – consider what sort of pose you want – baby or toddler does not need to be looking straight at the camera – it is often better to capture them doing something – playing with a toy or reacting to other people.  You will also reduce the chances of “red-eye” if baby is not looking directly at the camera.

·        Be patient – capturing a smile or a laugh without getting a goofy face is difficult – you have to take a lot of pictures to get one good one.  Don’t be scared to take 10 pictures and delete them all!

·        Get down to floor level and have the camera in your hand when you are playing with baby or toddler – shoot off lots of pictures and you will often get a brilliant action shot.

·        After you have downloaded the pictures to your computer you can work some final magic with them – there are many photo packages available that allow you to do all sorts of fancy stuff but the most effective function is simple cropping – the electronic equivalent of taking scissors to a print to remove the unwanted distractions of a cluttered background.  Bear in mind that cropping is going to change the dimensions of the picture so it may end up square or some other shape that will not fit exactly into normal frames or albums.  Make sure you keep an original version.

·        Lighting is crucial and natural light is always better than artificial so use the light coming in a window or take photos outside.  Use flash outdoors even if your camera tells you not to – most have the facility to switch the flash on for every picture.  Using a flash outdoors on a sunny day might seem odd but sunlight can be harsh and contrasty and the flash will fill in detail in the face.

·        Maybe this is obvious but make sure baby's face is clean!!