Children’s image of the month: April

My image of the month : April

Welcome to our April, children’s image of the month, blog circle!

For those of you that don’t know, I run a Facebook group which is all about outdoor children’s photography and I have close to 900 members now who support one another and discuss all elements of shooting outside. Last week a good friend (and very supportive member) Karen Wiltshire started a thread asking people to share their favourite image of the month. It got me thinking about starting a blog circle so we can also share all these great images outside of that group, so here is the first of our image of the month posts!

My image was taken on my Nottingham Workshop held last week at the Devere Orchards hotel which is within the grounds of Nottingham university, It’s a really interesting architectural building and also has some gorgeous formal and wild gardens outside. We photographed from 3-7pm and the image below was taken on the second shooting session around 6:30 pm. Usually we would avoid very harsh light and dappled light but in this case, we felt like we could use the light in a more creative way!

This breaks a number of lighting rules, but I loved the more editorial feel of the image. I also chose to edit the image in a different way, cooling down the greens with additional cyan and making the overall image more matt using curves. I love the colour of her hair compared to the foliage.

The image was taken on my 5diii with my 70-200 2.8L. I like to shoot at a low aperture so this was shot at 2.8.

To visit Stacey’s post about why having Mum & Dad in the photo is so important please click here

children's photographer nina mace photography

Behind the scenes kids photographer

Take a look behind the scenes at my location

kids photography

There’s nothing I love more than a behind the scenes blog, so I thought I would share a little video from the location I photographed at with my daughter last night. On the way home from school we spotted this patch of dandelions and as the weather was warm last night we took advantage and headed out for 10 minutes.

I chose to put her in a yellow dress to make the image feel more Spring-like. More recently I have been moving away from styling children and families in bright white. I am finding that, on some shoots, white clothing can steal the focus away from faces and will often start clipping in camera if I am exposing correctly for the skin. White clothing does have the advantage of helping to protect against green colour casts, but in this case, it wasn’t something I needed to worry about as I was shooting towards the end of the day.

This image was taken on my Canon 200 2.8L which is a prime lens and weighs much less than the 70-200 2.8L. (If you would like to see how this lens looks in comparison to the 70-200 see my blog post here about what kit I have).

My settings were 1/400 second, f/2.8, ISO 800, evaluative metering. For the edit, I warmed her skin up (as she looked a little cool against the golden light) and added a vignette to draw the eye to the subject.

I hope this video shows that you don’t need a great deal of space to take a lovely children’s portrait.

Nina Mace is a kids photographer based out of Hemel Hempstead offering family photo shoots, beginners and professional photography training. She has been awarded, Children. Family & Lifestyle Photographer of the year and more recently top 3 professional photography trainer. For more details of her courses or mentoring see here.