Family Portrait Tips
The Secrets to Great Family Portrait Photography

Are you looking for family portrait tips? Look no further. These family photography tips will help you learn the digital photography techinque you need to take beautiful portraits.

Coordinate Outfits

Coordinate what you'll wear for the picture. You don't have to have everyone wearing the exact same outfit. That's been done a lot and can even look hokey. Just make sure there aren't going to be any major clashes. Tell everyone to where solid colors. You don't want Aunt Iris in a floral print standing next to Cousin Jake in a plaid shirt. When people wear prints in portraits it tends to be too distracting anyway.

They don't have to wear the same color but colors that don't clash would be good. You can give general guidelines and request that everyone wear pastels for example. If you wanted you could give more specific guidelines and ask everyone to where blue. That depends on you. You do need to coordinate the outfits in some way though so their is a nice color palette to photograph.

Posing

Get everyone together. You may want to place people in some kind of order, whether you do that by age or height or any other way you can think of is entirely up to you. Who stands next to whom is not what's going to make or break you photograph.

You need to make sure everyone is relaxed and feeling good. That's what will make or break your photograph. Talk to them. If you're one of the family too that will make it easier for you to do. You know how to engage your family. You know what type of things they like to talk about. You know what subjects will naturally bring smiles to their faces. Talk about those things in a relaxed manner as you direct where and how they stand. Keep these directions to a minimum though. Often what relaxed comfortable people do naturally for photos is surprisingly good.

Walk around with the camera and take pictures from a variety of angles. This is one of the best family portrait tips. You don't have to have the camera front and center. Have them turn to look at you. Have them look someplace that's not at the camera. You can even have them look at each other.

Lighting and Camera Settings

Here are some family protrait tips for your camera settings. Set your camera at a low f-stop to widen your aperture. Doing gives your camera a shallow depth of field making the background appear blurry. Blurring the background puts the focus on the group you're photographing. If you feel that the background is important for the story you're telling ignore my advice and keep it in focus.

For the best results you should use a tripod if you can. A tripod will keep your camera steady and allow the photo to be in better focus.

Here are some family portrait tips for lighting. If your taking the picture outdoors, take it during a time of day when you'll have the best light. During the hour after sunrise or the hour before sunset will give you the best results. Take the picture in a shadey area to avoid the harsh glare of the sun. A bright overcast day also works well. The clouds act as natural difussors for the sun.

If you're taking pictures indoors, take the picture in a room that gets a lot of natural light. If you need to use a flash, use a flash gun and bounce the flash. Bouncing the flash will give you more natural looking light. You may need to use your flash if you're taking the photos outside too. Fill flash will help get rid of shadows on their faces. Find out more about flash photography here.

Have Fun

Have fun with the pictures. That's the most important of the family portrait tips. The more fun you're having the better the pictures will look. You can hold your camera vertically or horizontally. You can even hold it crooked if you like. Shoot from different and even extreme camera angles. Try shooting a picture from down very low or up very high.

You can have them pose in different ways too. Try having everyone lay on the ground and see how that turns out. Photography is creative. Experiment and see what happens.

I hope these family portrait tips helped you. If you want to find out more about portrait photography read my Portrait Photography Tips. If you want to find out more about family photography read my Family Photography Tips. If you just want to learn more about taking better pictures in general, try checking out my Digital Photography Tutorials.