Photographing babies and children is usually placed narrowly behind the subject of pets in most photographers’ table of nightmare commissions. You need to develop strong powers of persuasion, anticipation and stealth to get a good shot. And like many other specialist subjects in photography, shooting great portraits is 99 per cent preparation and 1 per cent good luck. If you want to improve your hit rate, then read the following tips

Natural light for portraits

Unlike the strong and stark light produced by an electronic flashgun, natural light produces sensitive and character-enhancing portraits when used indoors. Great for small babies, who are easily spooked by the rapid burst of flashlight, simple window light can be enough to cast soft and flattering light on your unwitting subject. Shooting portraits indoors using natural light can be a worthwhile technique and is easily controlled by using a homemade diffuser to stop excessive contrast produced by bright sunlight.

Portraits always look better if the subject isn’t squinting, so you can easily modify the contrast of your free light source by attaching a sheet of tracing paper to the window. Keep this out of the frame and notice how it reduces the depth of any dark shadows and creates a softer, more flattering result. If your digital compact has an auto-flash setting that fires off automatically in low light conditions, then make sure that it’s turned off and select a wide aperture value such as f4 to blur the background.

For babies, create a pose where it’s held by a family member and is facing the natural light source. Get close and make sure you shoot with a shallow depth of field to enhance the delicate nature of your subject. Less sharpness in this situation is a good thing because it creates a more evocative and less descriptive scene.

Long lens portraits

For those children who won’t stand still and pose for you, a better tactic is to shoot them with a long lens. Give your child a task to concentrate on and walk off to a reasonable distance so that they are not aware of your presence. For digital compact users, set your zoom lens at its maximum telephoto setting and try to pick out your subject from afar. For digital SLR photographers, try a 200mm telephoto lens together with a shallow depth of field to isolate your subject from its background and avoid distracting patterns. When shooting at a distance, you’ll notice that even the slightest body movement can result in camera shake, so it’s important to brace yourself when shooting. If there’s a nearby wall or other solid object, prop yourself against it and use a faster 1/250th second shutter speed. Don’t crop too tightly around a moving subject, or you’ll find some shots have missing feet, heads and other body parts.

Fly on the wall

Candid moments occur all the time, but you have to work fast enough to respond to these fleeting happenings. Instead of getting in the thick of the action, use a zoom lens and set yourself some distance away, in order to record children going about their playful business unguarded. Natural and unposed photographs will convey the personality of your child, rather than capturing them pulling faces or awkward poses. The secret to great candid photography is no more complicated than pressing the shutter at the right time.

A good habit to get into is to look through the camera viewfinder and wait patiently for a great photo to occur. Keep your eye on the situation or the chance may evaporate. Try to remain in the background and make sure that you are not spotted, or your subject may freeze or start pulling faces.

If you want to take advantage of fleeting moments, try having your digital camera primed and prepared to put into action immediately. Keep it in your pocket and keep one finger placed above the shutter release, so all you have to do is frame and focus when the chance appears. If you leave any more setting up tasks to do, you’ll probably miss your chance.

Shooting humour

It’s not necessary to shoot in a serious and moody style because you can capture someone’s personality just as well by inventing a humorous situation. Aim to shoot during a deliberately staged event – such as the opening of a parcel, a practical joke or when they’re eating an ice cream – and you’ll end up with a large selection of frames to choose from. Don’t be afraid to get in close to your subject and experiment with a very shallow depth of field.

Shooting at close range will give you focus fall-off within a very short distance, but this is fine for blurring out the background. Running ahead of your child and photographing it as it approaches you can provide a humourous seguence.

Fill-flash technique

Often called daylight flash, the fill-flash setting is a very handy tool for livening up all kinds of photographic subjects, including children’s portraits on location. Fill-flash works by firing a much-reduced burst of light that mixes with natural daylight to form a balanced exposure. It’s great for reducing the dense black shadows found under strong, sunny lighting conditions to much more acceptable grey. It helps to reduce contrast and restore balance to objects that fall within its limited range. Fill-flash is often used in press, public relations and wedding photography by skilled photographers aiming to reduce heavy shadows cast on a portrait by overhanging eyebrows! The trick with fill-flash is to make it unnoticeable and not to remove the delicate effect of the dominant natural light.

Documentary style

Much used by the new generation of wedding and portrait photographers, the documentary style is typified by its relaxed attitude and total rejection of set poses. Designed to make subjects look as natural and unguarded as possible, this style is a great way to turn family record portraits into great photographs in their own right. There’s no need to wait ages to observe your sitter in an unselfconscious moment, but you can direct and stage-manage your ‘actor’ until they are immersed in another activity. After shooting your portraits, try converting them into black and white, so that they become timeless by losing all trace of their date and contemporary context.

Pairs and couples

Rather than just shoot single portraits, a good idea is to create double or couple portraits. With the added ingredient of playing one person off against the other, this kind of portrait can really express both the character and relationship between mother and child or two siblings. Try shooting informal scenarios where there’s visible activity between the two, or engineer a situation where they are forced to interact. Great photographers think on their feet and can always see the potential in a setting or location. Use all that comes to hand and don’t be afraid to beg, borrow and steal photo recipes that you’ve seen elsewhere. You can spot recurring poses and popular settings and adopt them for your own use.

Pentax Optio 550

Many digital camera macro shots suffer, for example, from limited depth of field. This is because the camera’s setting a wide aperture to minimise the risk of camera shake. Alternatively, if you’re shooting outdoors in bright light, it’s difficult to create a sense of movement in action shots or with running water because the camera sets too high a shutter speed.

Pentax Optio 550 Photographic power

The Pentax Optio 550 does let you control both the shutter speed and the aperture. In shutter-priority mode, you adjust the shutter speed yourself and the camera automatically selects the right aperture to give you the correct exposure. In aperture-priority mode it’s the other way round. You can choose a wide aperture to throw a cluttered background out of focus or a small aperture for maximum depth of field -the camera automatically picks the right shutter speed to go with it.

Or you can control both aperture and shutter speed manually. On the Pentax Optio 550, this is done using the navipad on the back and an exposure indicator on the LCD. All this is on top of a standard point-and-shoot program AE, mode, so the Pentax is ideal for both beginners and experts.

It’s got a very impressive lens, too. Most digital cameras that belong to that age offer 3x zooms, but the Pentax lens has a 5x zooming range. What’s interesting here is that the Pentax sticks with an optical viewfinder- most digital cameras with this kind of zooming range switch over to electronic viewfinders, which show a genuine through-the-lens view, but can be dim and grainy-looking.

Pentax Optio 550 is a pretty advanced camera, but it doesn’t have the field to itself by any means. There are plenty of very good rivals out there already Canon’s PowerShot S50 is one, and Olympus’s very capable C-5050 is another. If you want a bigger zooming range, Minolta’s DiMAGE 7i is a superb camera with a 7x zoom and available at very good prices now, while FujiFilm’s FinePix S602 has great handling and a 6x zooming range. All of these digital cameras offer the same advanced exposure modes as the Pentax, so the question is: has it got some other tricks up its sleeve?

Well, a few. It has a ‘slim’ filter for example, designed to make people look fitter and leaner (yes, really). You can take time-lapse photographs of growing plants or sunsets, say, with its interval shooting option. There’s a multiple-exposure mode for use when you’re taking shots and, interestingly, for combining images you’ve already saved on the memory card. An auto-bracket function can help make sure you get the perfect exposure, and this is supplemented by an auto-white balance option to help you do the same with your images’ colour balance.

What else? There’s a voice recording mode for dictating notes when you take shots or adding notes to shots later. You can crop or resize saved images and you can have a bit of fun by recording movies in fast forward mode so that the action’s speeded up when you play them back.

You can also display a live image histogram while you’re taking pictures, and this can help you spot whether highlight or shadow detail is going to be ‘clipped’ (where it falls outside the CCD’s dynamic range) and lost – you can then adjust the exposure to fix it. Or, if your composition’s a bit suspect, you can switch on a visible grid which helps you place your subjects on ‘thirds’ within the frame.

The thing is that although these things are useful, they’re not unique. There’s little here that really sets the Pentax apart. It does have a novel 3D mode, where you take two shots from slightly different viewpoints and look at them wearing special glasses later, but unless you’re a fan of stereoscopic photography (a surprisingly well-established field, incidentally), it’s not something you’re going to be using every day.

Perhaps the biggest problem of Pentax Optio 550 is that it’s a bit ungainly and unappealing. The brushed metal/chrome finish on the front is nice but round the back the materials are much more functional. The high spot here is the main mode dial on the top plate, which is big and clear and has settings for each of the camera’s main exposure modes. It’s all logically laid out but everything still feels a bit cheap. One thing that’s particularly annoying is the camera’s startup time: five seconds is just too slow. Zooming, focusing and picture playback are all fine, so it’s a surprise it’s not a bit snappier at switching on. While we’re at it, the 16MB card you get with the 550 is way too stingy for a 5-megapixel camera.

On the upside, the Pentax’s picture quality is generally very good. It captures lots of sharp detail, as you’d expect from a 5-megapixel CCD, colours are natural and vivid, and the exposure system is very accurate in all sorts of lighting conditions – even if you just stick to the program AE mode and the default multi-pattern metering. (You can switch to centre-weighted or spot metering if you prefer.) The only problem we encountered was when shooting close-ups, where the lens displayed a vignette effect, with the image darkening in the corners. All in all, the Pentax Optio 550 digital camera is by no means a bad camera.

While it’s tempting to go really close to the display, you’ll get a much better perspective by staying well back. You’re  also less likely to have people getting in front of the camera or knocking into your tripod. It’s a waste of time and effort  trying to hand-hold for aerial displays, so remember to take a tripod, because it takes a few seconds for each volley of  fireworks to fill the sky.

One burst of fireworks isn’t really enough to produce an interesting picture, you need several to produce more impact, so  take lots of different shots that you can combine on your computer when you get home. The key to being able to do that  easily is to set an exposure that results in a black 0r very dark blue sky. Typically, this means aperture of  f/11 or f/16  at an ISO rating of 100 for around four to eight seconds (but do make sure you review your first couple of images to avoid  overexposure). The focal length of lens depends on the situation. Wide-angles enable you to Include people, water or buildings at the  bottom of the frame, giving a sense of scale and adding interest. However, it’s also worth doing some shots at telephoto  settings in order to concentrate attention on the colour of the fireworks.

Once the display begins, don’t be too hasty taking pictures – check through the viewfinder or on the LCD panel to make sure  the fireworks are exploding in the right place and, if necessary, adjust the composition. When you see some rockets go up,  keep your eyes peeled on the area where they’re lighting them and watch for the tell-tale streaks – that’s the time to open  the shutter, if you wait until you see them in the sky, you’ll be too late.

Shooting Bonfires

Wherever you are, there’s likely to be a bonfire, and this can be a great source of interesting images, providing you don’t  allow the digital camera’s white balance to remove the orange glow of the flames. Don’t just take shots of the bonfire -  particularly atmospheric are pictures of people silhouetted against the flames. Often there’s enough light coming from the  bonfire to take the shots hand-held at a high ISO setting, and if you follow the meter without correction you should get the  result you want. Whatever you do, don’t use flash when you’re photographing fireworks and bonfires- it will completely ruin  the mood. You’ll need a burst of flash, however, when taking pictures of people waving sparklers, since they don’t give off  enough light on their own. If this happens, feel free to give it a try on auto flash, but you may find the output is too  great, and the movement of the sparklers doesn’t register. If so, switch to slow synch, which will let more ambient light  register, giving a balanced exposure.

If you live in a built-up area you’ll have plenty of things you can photograph when it gets dark. Towns often come alive at  night, as the lights go on inside buildings. However, don’t wait until it actually gets dark to take your shots because  you’ll be too late – the sky wiil come out a solid black and the picture will look dead. In fact, the best time to snap your  ‘night’ shots is at dusk, just after the sun has set, when there’s still some colour in the sky.

Getting a balanced exposure is easier at twilight. If you wait untii it’s totally dark the contrast range is too great to be  captured successfully, and there’s the constant risk of overexposure if you leave the digital camera to its own devices.

You’ll also need to watch the white balance. Part of the charm of night shots is the vibrancy and excitement of the many  different coloured lights, but auto WB systems can easily compensate for the variety of sources, leaving you with images  that are rather bland. Most of the time you’ll find it best to set the white balance to daylight, so that floodlit buildings  have the warm, orange glow we expect them to have.

Shooting Neon Signs

On a dark, autumn evening nothing catches the eye more than a neon sign, and they make excellent photographs. In cities you  see them everywhere, advertising bars, restaurants and clubs, and capturing them successfully is easy if you crop in tight,  to exclude as much of the dark background as possible, and keep your ISO setting low to maximise the colours and minimise  noise.

As with fireworks, ISO 100 is ideal and if you use this setting, you should use a tripod. If you really can’t face dragging  your three-legged friend around with you, cranking the ISO up to 400 or 500 might give you hand-holdable shutter speeds -  but be aware that if you don’t use a trip, your photographs will exhibit iots of noise and will nave inferior colours.

If you want to capture a city at its best, try photographing the skyline as twilight descends. An elevated vantage point  away from the centre will often give you the best view. You’ll also get a more natural perspective, using a telephoto lens  rather than a wide-angle. Alternatively, find a spot in the heart of the action and capture all the hustle and bustle from close quarters. One of the most exciting ways to capture the excitement of the city is by photographing motion trails of  vehicles using a long shutter speed to convert them into a river of light.

With an ISO 100  sensitivity, you set an aperture of  f/11 and then vary the shutter speed from a few seconds to up to a  minute, depending upon how busy the traffic is. Choose a location where there’s a steady succession of cars going both ways,  so you have both red and white streaks in the picture, and interest in the surrounding buildings. Alternatively (and  provided you can do so safely), set up your tripod on a flyover that looks down upon a busy dual carriageway.