I started photographing children at a very early age. When I was
growing up I had two younger brothers and two younger sisters, and one
of the first things I ever purchased with my baby sitting money was a
camera.
It was a Kodak StarMite and I really loved that camera. My
siblings became my favorite subjects, and soon I was snapping photos of
them as often as I could. Living on a dairy farm also presented
opportunities for great photographs, and when I could afford it I
snapped away.
In those days everything was on film, and it was
expensive to develop film, particularly for a young girl. While I did
the best I could, I wish there could have been many more photographs of
those days.
But today we have no such excuse. Today's digital slr
cameras with memory cards you can take hundreds, even thousands of
photographs. But there are a lot of choices in cameras, and when I go to
a store and kind of peruse all of the choices there the sales person
always talks about how many pixels the images produced by the camera
will have.
Well, more pixels does not necessarily mean it is a
better camera, unless you are taking photographs to be blown up and
published on a billboard! You see, there is a limit to the number of
pixels that can be used to produce a photograph of a particular size.
So
while I am taking photographs of children the parents always ask me
what kind of camera to get. As a professional I have used most every
make of camera there is, and my favorite remains my Pentax Spotmatic SLR
camera.
It is not digital, requires no battery, and I get great
photographs with it. For digital cameras I love the Canon line of
digital slr cameras best of all.
The reason is that I find the
cameras to be intuitive. In other words, the various controls on the
camera are where I would expect them to be, and they do what I expect
they will do.
One of the more important things about the digital
slr cameras is battery life. Some cameras literally eat batteries. It is
so frustrating to be snapping away when the light is just right, the
subject is co-operating nicely and then the camera dies! Ugh...
This
is particularly true of child photography. Kids are in motion all of
the time, have a short attention span, and you can miss that very
special look in the blink of an eye.
So the best advice I can give
is don't spend a lot of money on pixels, rather make sure the camera
"feels" right, that the battery lasts a reasonable amount of time (buy
an extra battery too), and that it is easy to operate.
Be sure and
take the time to look through the manual that will come with the camera
to see if it makes sense, is easy to read and understand. So many times
I have gotten home with a new camera and have a hard time understanding
the instructions in the operator's manual.
Once you have
purchased a good digital SLR camera make sure you do the most important
thing - take a lot of photographs of your children. They grow faster
than you think, time passes by quickly when you are raising your kids,
and they will leave before you know it.
Don't miss the opportunities that are there now - they won't last long! Trust me, you will be glad you did!
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