A little look at my process and how I approach documenting my own children’s adventures

One of my passions as a photographer is memory keeping and creating tangible items that embody your precious moments in time for years to come. This is where The Story Keeper stemmed from, this continual series explores all areas of creating, preserving, organising and maintaining your own family story // Bec Zacher

My photography approach

I thought I would give you a little tutorial this week about how I photograph my own kids and what I look for and how I approach it.

We’re currently shacked up in a little beachside holiday house on the Sunny Coast. We’ve been spending a ton of time exploring the beach and I wanted to document the kids seeing this new area of coastline for the first time.

I’ve shared before that I always pick up my camera knowing what my final intention is with the images that I create. I make yearly photo books for my family and I have a general idea that I would likely include a two page spread from an afternoon at the beach like this. With that in mind, I want to create images that show –

The environment
The kids fascination with a new place
The way they explore the environment
The things they find
How they interact with each other

As it’s an outdoor location, I photographed with the vision that I wanted to create images showing them exploring a new area and everything they found along the way. Everything was led by the children, I just become a silent observer with my camera. I don’t set up shots but just follow them around and let things unfold naturally. If there is some beautiful light I might ask them to come check out that area but generally I love to photograph them in a storytelling and documentary style.

Gear and settings used for this shoot:

Shot on a Canon 5D Mark 3
Lens used was a 35mm Canon L series 1.2 lens
I shoot wide open using a 1.4 to 1.6 aperture
125 ISO
Various shutter speeds but I always stay over 200 so I can capture movement well
Custom white balance set to 6000 – 6300. I prefer to shoot slightly warmer as I find I get nicer skin tones in editing when I do this. To set my white balance I simply take a few shots at the location and change it in camera until I’m happy with how the warmth looks.

It was a super stormy and windy day so my edits reflect that as that was part of the story of the afternoon as we ducked down to the beach in between rain showers. These images were created in the 15 minutes that we were there.

Another thing I do is that I start photographing from the time we arrive until we leave, I want to tell the whole story of getting to and from the location as that’s a great part of the journey and I always do this in client sessions as well.

Before and after examples & my editing process

I try and get my settings as spot on in camera as I can so that there is less editing to do. I try and expose the image correctly and not blow out any of the highlights so that I can retain all of the detail in the image. If it’s a super bright day or there is a hot spot of light, I will expose for that bright area so that it doesn’t get blown out.

I have my own custom presets that I have developed over the past few years. You can check them out here ~ Story Keeper Presets.

The final edited images

I love capturing things from a variety of angles to show what it looks like from my children’s perspective. I’ll often shoot down on top of them, looking up or at their level. I don’t often shoot at my own eye level if I can move into a lower or higher position to capture the moment.

The kids found this pool of stagnant water and the sun was coming from behind me and creating a really cool reflection on the water so instead of photographing the kids faces I captured their reflections.

I love detail shots and capturing the little parts of my kids that change so quickly over the years. Another thing I am always conscious of is placing the horizon of the water below or above a head and not cutting through it. Getting down low always helps with this and I always straighten a crooked horizon when I edit at they drive me nuts!

The kids had been running around non-stop and were all playing on this log so they were super happy to snuggle up for a quick two second photo together. This would never of worked at the start when we arrived but is much more likely to happen when they have burned off some energy and need a quick rest.

I’m always on the lookout for interesting light. The kids were walking back to the house and I took a few images but then I saw the pocket of light on the path and set up quickly to capture that shot as the light adds a lot more interest. I’m always drawn to choose an image depending on the light and how it adds interest to an image.

A few things I look out for ~

Shooting from interesting angles -

I love capturing things from a variety of angles to show what it looks like from my children’s perspective. I’ll often shoot down on top of them, looking up or at their level. I don’t often shoot at my own eye level if I can move into a lower or higher position to capture the moment.

Reflections -

The kids found this pool of stagnant water and the sun was coming from behind me and creating a really cool reflection on the water so instead of photographing the kids faces I captured their reflections.

Noticing the details & the horizon -

I love detail shots and capturing the little parts of my kids that change so quickly over the years. Another thing I am always conscious of is placing the horizon of the water below or above a head and not cutting through it. Getting down low always helps with this and I always straighten a crooked horizon when I edit at they drive me nuts!