You may not recognize this phrase (Show, Don’t Tell) if you didn’t go to middle/high school with me, although I feel fairly confident that it didn’t originate with Mrs. Brown. Who is Mrs. Brown? She was my English teacher in sixth and twelfth grades, and really focused on creative writing. Not photography, but as I shoot and explore photography, my mind keeps returning to Mrs. Brown’s recurring mantra: Show, Don’t Tell. I think this is because I really want to encourage you to look at photography as a kind of storytelling: it’s a story you’re writing about your children, your family, for the ones you love who are not with you or who don’t even exist yet.

So what does Show, Don’t Tell actually mean? It means that you have to allow your story, or your image in this case, to do the talking for you. I’ll put it in writing terms first and then try to unpack it with some pictures. I turned on my radio a couple weeks ago and caught the tail end of a Lake Wobegon story, told by master storyteller Garrison Keillor, who has the power to evoke laughter in one moment and then wring your heart the next. His story was about a New York dancer who was picking up his elderly parents at the airport. For fear of missing their flight, they’d gotten to the Minneapolis airport so early that they’d been put on an earlier flight instead, and had been waiting at the airport for a few hours already. Keillor painted this wonderful image with just a few words (forgive me if my words are not exact but this is my memory):

He saw his parents sitting in the airport diner, sharing a bowl of soup, leaning in to each other.

I heard those words and I immediately had this picture in my mind of decades of marriage, of comfort and quiet, of vein marbled hands, and a solid, enduring love. Keillor showed all this with this powerful visual image of two old people, leaning in to each other. Just imagine if, instead, he had said something like “His parents, who had been married for 47 years, still showed their love for each other by sharing many things, like their soup, and talking together.” Ew. That’s Telling, Not Showing.

Guess what? You can do that with your photography, too. Look for the emotion on your child’s face and get in close when she blows out the candles on her birthday cake. The story isn’t about the other five people around the table or the plates and napkins, it’s the look in her eyes and her puffed out cheeks as she blows.

How about at the beach? Try getting in and telling the story of your baby’s day at the beach. Get down low—show those sandy feet and lips (what, your kids don’t eat sand?). Show the details of his shovel.

One of the absolute best examples I have seen lately of this kind of photography—Show, Don’t Tell—was an image captured by Jen Mielbrecht at a wedding this summer. She sent me a handful of pictures in an email, all of which are lovely (you can see them on her blog here, and if you are in the Cincinnati area and looking for family pictures, give her a call), but this one stopped me cold. I begged for her permission to use it in this post. Just look at it:

This one image wraps up so much of the joy and emotion of the wedding day. The look on Lindsay’s face says everything about her new marriage that you would have to take an awkward paragraph to try to explain.

I had some fun going back through my images from the past few years and found some more that I felt like did a good job with this Show, Don’t Tell concept.

A couple things to keep in mind when you are working on Show, Don’t Tell: keep it simple; get in close; get down low. More on some of these coming soon.

So, here is the dial from a Canon Digital Rebel (not my camera, and I don’t know which model it is, but it shows you what I’m talking about and thank you, jen, for the image).  This information is pretty universal, so even if your camera’s dial looks different, you have most of the same modes (even on your point-n-shoot if that’s what you’re using).

Canon separates the shooting modes into two classes:  the Basic modes and the Creative modes.  In the interest of not killing you in one blow, I’ll just hit the Basic modes today.  The Creative modes are the letters on the dial; the Basic modes are the pretty pictures.  In these modes, the camera does all of the heavy lifting for you–deciding what ISO/shutter speed/aperture combination you want, based on what you tell it that it’s looking at (there are some other decisions being made, too, but I’m just talking about the big three for now, OK?).  Probably eventually, you won’t have to tell the camera what you’re looking at; it will just know exactly what it is and all you’ll have to do is push the shutter button.  Actually, someone asked me to take a picture for them with their point and shoot camera the other day and it put little boxes around the faces in the picture–some kind of facial recognition thing.  It was kind of cool.  So, some cameras are already there.

Actually, to be honest, if your camera is permanently set on the little green box in there, your camera might as well already be there, because you are not making any decisions about your pictures, except what the subject is.  So let’s get away from the green box.

• the green box (aka “full auto”):  OK.  If you use this setting, your camera is making every single decision for you.  You point the camera and press the button.  That’s it.  If the camera thinks it’s dark, it will pull out the flash for you.  If people are running around, tough.  If you are wanting to get up close, good luck.  If you’re shooting scenery, keep your fingers crossed.  I’ll be honest, I don’t see much good in this setting.  Trust me, you are smarter than your camera.  I mean that.
• the black box/no flash:  I know, this is at the other end of the dial.  I didn’t promise to go in order, did I?  This is the black box with the line through the squiggly flash symbol.  It’s basically the same mode as the green box, but the flash will never ever fire.  It’s an improvement because I am really biased against using the flash in general.  So now the camera will do whatever it needs to in order to get an image without using the flash.  You may have blur, your images may be underexposed (too dark, hey, it happens!), but the good news is you won’t get that blown out, red eyed, possessed action going on either.
• running man (aka sports mode):  This was one of my favorite modes, especially with kids, because they are always always always moving.  Here, the camera sets a higher ISO, say 400, picks a faster shutter speed, and lets the aperture fall where it may.  The flash will not fire.  Also, on many cameras, if you hold the shutter button down, it will keep taking pictures quickly until you let go or until its internal memory fills up.  This is great if you’re trying to capture one moment, like a child catching a ball, or diving into the pool–moments you can’t really predict super accurately.  You can toss the moments leading up to and after if you like (or you can make a fun collage or storyboard showing the sequence!).
• portrait (aka portrait):  I liked this mode a lot, too.  The camera picks a lower ISO for better color and less noise, sets a lower apeture (a bigger opening inside the lens so you can get that fun blurry background!), and mostly lets the shutter speed fall where it may (although it won’t go very slow).  If it doesn’t think there’s enough like, it will break out the flash.  If you hold the shutter button down, it will keep shooting (because you know, people blink).
• mountains (aka landscape):  Here, the camera will pick a high aperture number so that more of the picture will be in focus.  No flash (you can’t really light up a mountain very well).  No burst mode (you want a second picture, you hit the button again).
• flowers (aka macro):  This is for taking close up pictures (how close you can get depends on your camera/lens) of things like flowers.  The camera picks kind of a middle of the road aperture (you will still get a blurry background because when you are shooting close up it doesn’t take a low aperture to blur a picture).  No flash, only one picture at a time, please.
• starry dude (aka night mode):  This is not one I’ve used a lot, but it’s the kind of setting you use if you want a night time picture in front of the Eiffel Tower or something like that.  The camera understands that it’s dark.  So it picks a slow shutter speed to get a decent exposure of the Eiffel Tower, and then hits the flash to get a decent exposure of you (or whoever is standing in front of said tower).  If it didn’t do the slow shutter speed, you wouldn’t see the Eiffel Tower (or the stars), but if you did the right amount of shutter for the tower/stars, then you wouldn’t see you.  Or you would be really blurred.  Because most of us can’t hold that still.

So there is a quick rundown of what exactly the options on your camera are.  I recommend picking the mode based on what you’re shooting, which will put you one step closer to better pictures.  If you’re at your son’s soccer game, use the sports mode.  Hey, I’d even try that for a birthday party–no flash, start shooting when they start blowing out the candles, and you will get a very fun sequence of puffed out cheeks, leaning flames, and the smile at a successful puff!  Want a cute headshot of someone who is willing to hold relatively still?  Take them outside (always better light than your fluorescent bulbs!) and set yourself in portrait mode.  Don’t be afraid to get in close.

Next time, we’ll talk about the letters on the other side fo the green box.  For now, get away from the green box and play.  Go ahead, touch that dial!

The title has the word “trinity” in it, not as a religious allusion, but because there are three major technical factors which play into every image that comes out of your camera, and they all depend on each other. Change one and the other two (or at least one) have to adjust accordingly. Set two and your third one falls into place pretty easily. What is this trinity? It’s ISO, shutter speed, and aperture (f-stop). Now, I’ll remind you that if you’re shooting in one of your camera’s “basic” modes, like “portrait” or “sports” (I call mine the running man) or “landscape”, your camera is setting these for you. You may not know what it’s setting, but trust me, it’s setting things, and believe it or not, you could do it just as easily as the camera can and you might even do it better (once you understand what you’re doing, that is). So here goes:

• ISO: hey, remember back before say, 2000, when people didn’t really own digital cameras and we all had a little point-n-shoot 35 mm camera? And, you know, we had to buy rolls of film for it? Well, remember how you had to decide between 100 film for “bright sunny days” and 400 for “indoors” and 1600 for “fast action”? Those numbers referred to how sensitive to light the film was. The higher the number, the more sensitive to light, which meant you could shoot with less light (like indoors). The cost was grainy pictures. Well, with film, you still have ISO and if it helps you to think of it as film speed, then please do so. Think 100 for your highest quality shots where you have lots of light available; 400 is great for soccer games; 1600 is nice for indoors in darker situations. The less light you have, the higher ISO you want, or else you will end up with dark pictures.
• Shutter speed: this is simply how long the shutter of your camera is open. When you press the button and hear the camera click, an actual physical door opens (at least on DSLRs, I guess I can’t vouch for how smaller cameras do it). The shutter speed is a number which tells you how long that door is open. 1/100 means the shutter is open for 1/100 of a second. The longer the amount of time that’s open, the more motion blur you may get in your pictures. For example, if you’re taking pictures at your son’s soccer game, you probably don’t want to go below 1/250 of a second, because at slower speeds, you’ll see motion trails. At 1/80 of a second, even a moderate hand gesture during speaking will be blurred. 1/60 and slower, you’d better have that camera on a tripod because no matter how steady you think you are, your hands shake when you’re taking a picture.
• Aperture: for me personally, this is the really mind bending one. Inside the lens of your camera is a set of petals, like on a flower (caveat: remember I am not an expert, I’m just trying to clarify with what I know). You (or your camera) can actually make a decision about how big that opening is, and that can have pretty dramatic effects on your picture. If the opening is really big, that means a low aperture, which brings out that background blurriness that I personally dig. If the opening is small, that means a high aperture, which means that much more of your picture will be in focus (handy for group shots where you want the people in the back row to be just as sharp as the people in the front row). I believe the number relates to something mathematical, which means I don’t really want to know, but just remember that a small number (like 1.8) actually means a big opening; a big number (22) means a teeny opening.

Now, this all gets very exciting because each one of these numbers depends on the other two, kind of like a three legged stool. If the legs don’t all match, you’ll fall over as soon as you try to sit on the stool. To keep your stool level (level meaning a good exposure), you have to adjust all three to work together. You have some options for how to adjust them: (1) you can let the camera pick all three; (2) you can pick one and let the camera decide the other two; (3) you can set two and let the camera finish the last one; (4) or you can be really brave and set all three all by yourself. The same rules apply to you and to the camera in making these decisions. Just remember that you are smarter than your camera, which is why I recommend picking (3) or (4). Your camera can make relatively intelligent decisions about the amount of light available, but it honestly has no idea what you’re looking at.

In the interest of your brain, which may be melting at this point, I’ll defer more details for another post and instead will point you to a couple links as resources. The first is The Pioneer Woman, a hilarious blogger and tangential thinker (my kind of gal) who lives on a cattle ranch and loves photography. So she blogs about it. She blogs about a lot of other things, also (I’m hooked on Black Heels to Tractor Wheels), but for today I’ll point you to a post about Aperture. The other nifty link is to a fellow photographer’s spinoff site called My Fun Camera, which is designed to be a resource for you to learn more about your camera. She has a nifty little pocket sized camera guide for sale–kind of a cheat sheet for helping you know/remember what settings to use in a given situation. It’s very cute. I bought a set and have been working on giving them away.

So, take a deep breath, don’t think too hard about these very general definitions, and relax. My next shooting tips will talk about the practical applications (meaning I will uncover some of the mystery behind the basic settings on your camera!). And I’ll have pictures. Now I feel bad about not giving you a picture here. So here, from a recent trip to the beach with my own family:

Pretty, isn’t it? I did take pictures of my own children, too, but am saving the best for Father’s Day, so I can’t show it to you. Sorry. But you can see this one:

It’s a Canon lens, because I own a Canon camera, but if you shoot Nikon, they have a very similar lens. It’s Canon’s 50mm f/1.8 prime, a portrait lens affectionately known as a “nifty fifty”. Notice that it’s under $100, which is kind of incredible. It’s plastic, which is part of the reason for the price, so it’s not indestructible, but unless you destroy it within a week you can’t not get your money out of it (Sorry for all the double negatives there!). Now, what do those numbers mean?

50mm means that it’s a fixed focal length. There is no zooming action on this baby. If you want to get in tighter or out farther, you, the photographer, have to move; there is nothing to turn. It makes shooting a little more active, but that’s not a bad thing. Also, not having a zoom capability in the body of the lens means that there are less parts inside to worry about and prime lenses (non zooming ones like this one) generally will give you sharper images.

f/1.8 is a harder concept to wrap your brain around, especially since we’ve not discussed fun words like aperture and depth of field on here, but in a nutshell, what this means is that your lens will open up wider inside to allow more light in, and when it does, the amount of picture that is actually in focus goes down. This is something you just have to experiment with and play with to start understanding, and you can certainly read pages about aperture (also known as f-stop) and depth of field, but in the interest of brevity, for now I will just tell you that I love low f-stops.

Now, what does that mean in your pictures? I’ve got some examples here of what a low f-stop will do for your pictures. All of these were taken with my “nifty fifty” at low low low apertures.

Just Bailey’s left eye, cheek, and the line of her nose is in focus. This was at f2.2, caught in a quick instant while we were laying in the grass. Everything else is blurred, which I like.

I really wanted to catch Sam’s eyes here (f1.8). See how quickly the focus falls off, so that even his mouth is starting to blur. Because so much of the picture is Sam, you can’t even see the dock he’s sitting on.

Here’s Marissa’s hands at 3 months, shot at 1.8. Now, part of the reason for the 1.8 here is to work with the low light (we were inside). If I’m shooting inside, my preference is always to compensate for the lower light by opening the camera up to a low aperture (this way I don’t have to use the flash). See how just her fingers are in focus, and the card right next to her hands is blurred?

This is shot at f2.0, another low aperture. Heidi’s blowing bubbles, which are generally really neat when they’re in focus, but here the focus is on her face. If I’d wanted the bubbles in focus, I could have raised my aperture and gotten both her and the bubbles in focus, or I could have focused on them and let her face blur (which would have been fun, but probably not what our aim is in a portrait session).

Here’s Marissa again, the color version of the same picture I showed you in black & white last time. It’s also at f1.8. Her face is in focus, but look at her right hand–it’s not. That is how little depth of field you have to work with at these low apertures. The grass falls off into a pretty, light filled blur, and the added bonus is that you can’t tell it’s the neighbor’s house behind the trees.

Now, I have to warn you: you can’t just buy one of these lenses and throw it on your camera and automatically get the low aperture numbers without knowing what you’re doing with your other settings, so I’ll talk about settings in general next time. The lens is a great start, and the low aperture is just one fun way to play with it. I love this lens for many reasons; the aperture is just one of them. To compare, your kit lens will open up to about 5.6, maybe a little lower, and that doesn’t give you much room to play. If you’ve got a DSLR and are wanting a “next step” lens to experiment with, this is a great one, especially with children.

So I’m putting my sign up. I certainly don’t have a lot of answers, but I’ve already started my own little section of posts (called shooting tips (for moms)) in the effort to spread some photography love around. I’d like to continue doing so, especially here on the blog (save my emails a little repetition). So, if you have photography questions, no matter what they are (or computer questions, since that is an interest of mine as well), let me know and we’ll talk about it here on this forum. If I don’t know the answer, I’d love to go digging and find out. So, please share your questions, and I will try to share my answers!

You have to get the film developed, people! Oh sorry, I had a flashback. Put the pictures on your computer, really. If you bought your computer anytime within the past…four years, I’ll say, you should have a pretty big hard drive with plenty of room for your pictures. The problem is generally not the space on your computer; for most of us, what’s holding us back is finding the pictures again once we’ve put them on there. Windows doesn’t have a very useful built in photo library or catalog, so I’m going to make some software recommendations for you. These programs will help you get the pictures on the computer, sort them, label them, email them, arrange them, and even edit them.

Picasa is a great little library for your pictures put out by Google, which means, and this is the best part, that it’s free. Honestly, it doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles, but it will help you get the pictures on the computer, sort them, rate them, and even do some minor editing for you (black&white, tinting, sharpening, rotating, etc.). If you use Gmail (which is worth every penny…oh wait, that’s free too), it makes emailing pictures really easy (I mean, no more emailing out 4MB huge files that no one wants filling up their inbox). If you don’t use Gmail, it still makes emailing pictures pretty easy.

My other suggestion will cost you money, but I will say that I prefer it over Picasa, and it’s still not much. You will be able to do a lot more editing and tweaking and I feel like the cataloging/organizing function is quite a bit more robust. The program is put out by Adobe and it’s called Photoshop Elements. It has quite a few of the same features of its big brother Photoshop, including layers, the healing brush, and many things you may never use, but they are packaged in a pretty user friendly setup (big brother is not for the faint of heart). The organizer side of Elements is fantastic and will help you label pictures, rate them, email them, and just keep them organized. Your favorite wholesale club probably sells it for less than Adobe does, and it’s worth it.

If you are really enthusiastic about your photography and are itching to spend money, try Adobe’s Lightroom. This is the program I use for organizing my pictures and doing quite a bit of post processing (only problem children need the full blown Photoshop treatment), and it’s a gem. It’s aimed at pro photographers, so it may not be for you, but if you’re willing to spend the money it is awesome.

So, now that you’ve been taking pictures, get them off of your camera and onto your computer. Try one of these programs (both of Adobe’s offer a free 30 day trial) and see how they can change your life. Next time, I’m going to talk a little bit about what you do when you have the images on your computer.

Moms are the same everywhere, aren’t we? There is a sweet verse about Mary, who “treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.” We all do that. We see our babies differently than anyone else, with a mother’s eye. We cherish dimples, just like anyone, but our hearts are melted by the curl of our little one’s ears. Or the dribble of milk rolling down her cheek as she smiles that drunken sated grin after she’s done nursing. The trick is to capture that memory with your camera!

Check out this great DVD: Refuse to Say Cheese and Capture the Story. It’s the first of two, so you might consider buying both as a set (especially if you are a new DSLR user or thinking about getting one!). The DVDs were created by the husband and wife team behind Me Ra Koh Photography, who both have a passion for enabling parents (especially mommies) to capture the story of their own families on camera. I own the first one and it is both practical and inspiring! If you want to improve the images you capture of your own children, want to improve your photography skills, or figure out what your camera actually does, this is a fantastic resource. It would make a great late Valentine’s gift, early Mother’s Day, getting ready for Easter (come on, you know you will all be taking pictures!)…

Sorry for the lag in posts lately; I have been scrambling with some other projects around here and have been a slacker. I’ll be letting you know about one of my spring projects pretty soon–keep an eye out! In the meantime, check out Refuse to Say Cheese, Me Ra’s site, and her blog. Her story and her passion are inspiring!

Today’s tip is simple: take lots of pictures. Back in the dark ages of film (OK, not dark ages, but back when digital wasn’t thought of), every picture had a cost: you paid your money for the film itself and then again for the developing. A bad picture, whether it was out of focus or had someone’s eyes closed or was just at the wrong moment, was wasted money. Today, the memory cards for your camera can hold hundreds of pictures at a time, even shooting at your camera’s highest resolution. The computer you just bought measures its capacity in hundreds of gigabytes. Getting your pictures onto your computer has never been easier, and once they are there, deleting the bad ones is simple. We really have no excuse not to press the shutter. We have no excuse to miss an action shot. Taking a posed shot? Still, take two. Or three. The more people in the picture, the more likely it is that someone will close their eyes at a crucial moment.

If your camera has a sports setting or a burst mode, try it. If you hold down the shutter, the camera will keep taking pictures until you let go or until you fill up the camera’s internal memory. This is a great way to capture action (which, let’s face it, that’s what you have with kids). If you wait for the “right” shot, chances are good that you will miss the moment altogether. I’ve pulled some images out of our family vault to share.

This one is an oldie but still one of my favorites. I have about 30 pictures from this afternoon in the backyard with my two oldest (who are now 7 and 5). Some are probably candidates for deletion but I just love the exuberance in them. I shot this with our old Sony point n’ shoot. You don’t even have to have a great camera. Yes, it’s blurred, and yes, the old neighbor’s junk pile is clearly visible, but I love it.

Spring break last year. Andy and the kids were jumping off this bit of sand (sand bank?) and I just sat back and shot and shot and shot. It was hilarious.

This one would fall into the category of “missed shots”. Hey, they happen. This is Michael’s turn on the bag swing and this picture was unfortunately just at the bottom of the swing’s movement. You just don’t get a sense of the motion on this, the excitement, the height. But if you don’t keep shooting, chances are good that you end up with a pile of these instead of last post’s keepers.

We live in Florida, so we have a lot of these kinds of pictures. Quite often, they don’t work at all because the camera doesn’t capture just the “right” moment, but when they do, we love them. If your camera has a burst setting, start shooting at the beginning of the toss and see what you get. If it doesn’t have a burst setting, be ready to shoot because this toss doesn’t last long, but hesitate just a moment, maybe half a moment, and get the shot right after the toss.
Seriously, keep taking pictures. Shoot now instead of waiting until the moment is “right”. The “right” moment might slip by while you’re waiting for it!