A Guest Post by Travis Hill from The Perfect Pose

In recent years photojournalism has been all the rage. Just capture the day or moment as it happens. Honestly that is wonderful style of photography that many people enjoy. The problem is, everyone’s doing it. With so many new photographers in the market today, it’s imperial that we set ourselves apart from the crowd. With that being said lets ask ourselves honestly. How many times have our wedding clients not wanted any formal photographs? How many times have our portrait clients asked; “What should I do”? In these situations we cannot simply rely on photojournalism. We must be able to instruct our clients how to stand, how to hold their shoulders back, we as professional photographers need to tell our clients how to look

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Image by Andrew®

Our last community workshop gave one of our readers some great tips on how to approach photographing a model so I’ve decided to post another reader question. This one is a question I get quite a bit – how do I photograph the birth of a baby?

Here’s the latest question from one of our readers – Drew.

“My wife and I are expecting the birth of our new baby daughter in two weeks time and I’m wondering if you might have any advice on how to photograph the birth?

It’s such a special time for us as family that we want to capture it somehow but I’m a little nervous about how to do it tastefully, meaningfully and without my camera dominating the

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Image by mootje_ mootje

1. It can be exciting photographing a newborn so compose a list of shots you want to take before you pick up the camera. Grab these ‘safe shots’ first and once you have this selection in the bag, start to get creative with new angles and ideas.
2. The best lens to use when photographing any type of portrait is a fast 50/85mm prime lens. Operating at wide apertures (small f number) will allow you to work in darker environments and capture stills with the focus on your subject and a blurred backdrop to remove distraction.
3. If you’re uncomfortable operating in manual mode then plump for Aperture Priority and opt for a wide aperture of f4 or f5.6. Focus on your subject’s face and include a section of

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Time for another dPS poll. This one is for DSLR users (which is the vast majority of our readers) and revolves around the type of lenses being used in our community.

Do You Primarily Shoot with Zoom or Prime Lenses?

A quick recap for those not familiar with prime lenses – in short they’re a fixed focal length lens. Of course a zoom lens is one which you can…. well…. zoom. It is generally named with the range of its zoom.

For me – my primary lens is a zoom lens (24-105mm Canon) and the second most used lens in my bag is a prime lens – a 50mm f1.4 Canon lens (both are pictured above).

So which do you primarily …

One effecct that many of our readers experiment is creating custom Bokeh shapes. It’s a fun DIY little project for a rainy day – this video tells you how to do it.

The video is by Lucas Ridley.

Further Reading on this topic: Aperture Mask – the Many Faces of Bokeh.