Photography is a good way to remember all the different stages in your life. When your children go to one grade to the next, when you marry the one you love, buy a new house, or just to give a viewpoint of the everyday instances throughout the year. The important moments, or the ones that just invoke mild interest, a picture is a landmark and one of the most important of those landmarks is the birth of a child.

Babies are the most popular targets for photos and unfortunately the most difficult to capture on film. You need a lot of skill and patience in order to get a successful baby shot. One thing that you see often in such photos is red eye. Many people think that in order to capture everything well on film that they need to use a flash. This isn t the case. In terms of babies, natural light is better than bright, glaring, artificial light.

Especially since natural light doesn t give the baby those dreaded red eyes that so often ruin a good picture. So try using the light coming through the window or just take the picture outdoors, either way it makes a huge difference.

However if you can t avoid red eye a lot of cameras have a red eye reduction function and if yours does not there is free software is available on the internet that can fix the problem for you. Another common issue is the blurring of images.

Babies are usually hard to control, especially when you want them to be still for a photo that they don t really want to take. A solution is the use of a high iso speed camera along with a big aperture. With the two combined you can freeze moments that would have been lost before. Keep in mind that your background should be kept as simple as possible.

That means that backgrounds with too many things going on can overshadow your subject. To avoid that you can either zoom in or move closer to your baby. You can also keep them dressed in light, solid colored clothes because patterns and heavy colors can distort the baby s face and eyes. Too much color, whether on your baby or off is bad for the overall image and you should work to avoid it.

Your main focus is your baby and they are often interesting enough on their own that if you need props or extra additions, they can be simple and few. When taking shots, unless you want the distorted effect, don t use a wide angled lens. There are other ways to make an impact on a photo other than distortion and bright colors however. The simplest things are often the most effective.

You can focus on the things that are associated with the baby instead of the baby itself, take a snapshot of your baby in a strange pose or engaging in some strange behavior or facial expression to add a bit of spice to the picture. Mirrors and blurred backgrounds are also popular in baby photography. The point is to have fun and if you keep that in mind everything else should just fall in place.