Five Summertime Photo Tips

At The Blended Blog we are having a little summer time fun and sharing a few favorite things about summer.  You can see the prompts for June and July below!  Today is all about Summer Photo Tips and, while I am not professional, summer is one of my very favorite times of year to take pictures.   Come along and find out why!

For those of us with busy schedules (that would be ALL of us right?!), summer offers the largest window in the day for taking pictures.  With the increase in activities over the summer there are just so many opportunities capture special moments. Here are a few of my tips and suggestions for capturing your own sweet summer memories.

Be Aware of the Light

When I first began loving photography, I was so shocked to find the prime time to take pictures is not when the sun is shining brightly.  My first tip for creating the best photos in summer is to know when the sun rises and when the sun sets each day.  Not only do you want to pay attention to when but you also want to be very familiar with where.  Whether you are shooting pictures of people or inanimate objects, the last thing you want is to show up to the location in the morning when the best light is in the evening.

Cheat the Midday Light

When you are on an outing in the middle of the day there are ways to cheat the midday light just a bit.  For me, the things I want to avoid are squinty eyes and shadows.  One easy fix is to have your subject wear sunglasses to prevent the raccoon eye look.  I have several in my family with strong light sensitivity and what I typically do is have them stand smiling with their eyes closed and have them open quickly on the count of 3 and shoot rapid fire for several pictures.  It almost always results in a much better shot.

Use buildings and alley ways to your advantage to create shade or to bounce the sunlight onto your subject.  When in doubt work on taking the picture from various angles and directions.  Sometimes just shooting from below or above the subject can create something fantastic!

Another tip is to stay away from posed photos.  Take action shots of your family member doing an activity like maybe walking through a field of flowers or a strawberry patch.

Or jump right in and use the shadows to your advantage!  Capturing the shadows of your kids swinging or playing ball can really create a neat picture.  My friend Holly did something similar to the picture below for Father’s Day one year and it was adorable. (See the source for more details.)

Source

Head Indoors

There are so many locations such as libraries and museums with lots of natural light.  Your own home can also be a great location to pose the kids in a summer activity and catch the memory.  Food is my favorite all year but especially in summer experimenting with photos of little hands washing strawberries or a mouth messy with fresh watermelon can create some artsy photos.  We took this picture on a high floor of a hotel with huge windows and it captured a perfect moment of three very rejuvenated moms after a a much needed weekend away.

Experiment

If you really want to up your photo game, the biggest hurdle is learning lighting and finding time to take thousands of pictures. Yes, I am serious.  The only way to ever figure out how the light will effect your pictures is to try it at all angles, in all directions, at different times of day, in various locations and with various subjects.  Using a variety of lenses can also be fun and if you love photography at all I really do suggest, regardless of whether you are a Nikon or Canon person, you grab a 50mm lens for your camera bag.  Getting that amazing bokeh (aka blurry background)  you see and love in pictures is so much easier to create if you have the right equipment and this lens will not break the bank.

Capture Moments

Get behind the camera and shoot!  If you hate the picture it only takes a click to never see it again but you might surprise yourself. Here are some of my favorite things to shoot in the summer.

1 . Sunrise and Sunset

2.  Water…..beach, lake, sprinklers, rain….I love it all equally!

3.  Activities from baseball to bike rides to family vacations; all activities are opportunities to capture a memory that will one day fade.

4.  If it taste yummy it will look amazing in a picture!  Watermelon and ice cream are definitely easy wins!

5.  Nature is so busy in the summer!  Capture it!

Hopefully you picked up a few tips to try!  I really, really cannot stress enough photography is all about practice if you really want to up your game.  Aside from sports, my camera has been on the shelf for too long and I really need to do something about that! I’ve become way too dependent on my phone and while I was browsing back through the pictures on my computer it became painfully obvious the quality is not the same.  Beth of Our Pretty Little Girls is introducing a photo challenge for July today and I just may have to work on participating with my big girl camera.

Be sure to head over to The Blended Blog to see the others sharing their Summer Photo Tips and link up your own!

And as always, visit the Linkup Love tab in the navigation bar to see all the bloggers I’m joining this week!