The sunny skies and green grass mean one thing – the perfect scenery for some photos! With the end of the school year plays, sports games, recitals, and more taking place in the next couple of weeks, dust off your camera and use the crisp, beautiful weather and many activities as an opportunity to take some updated pictures of your kids!

For some quick tips and tricks for picture taking this season, I asked our friend Kara Raudenbush, photographer and owner of Lens Friends Studios in Huntington Valley, PA, to share some of her favorite ways to capture special moments this spring. You may recognize Kara from a previous blog post we did together; sharing some tips for taking better photos of your kids. Since Lens Friends are a DIY photo studio where you can use the studio’s camera, lighting, and props, Kara give a lot of great photography guidance to customers and was nice enough to share some with us again!

Kara’s 5 Tips For Taking Pictures This Spring:

1) Best time to take pictures: Start with an easy lighting situation. On the shady sides of a building, in the shade of some trees, in the early morning or late evening. Working with your children in these situations makes it easier for your camera to measure the light more evenly when you are shooting in automatic.

2) Good poses for babies and kids: Have some fun with it and give them some direction but try to avoid posing. They will fall into a more natural pose if you just show them what to do vs. Molding them into it.

3) Fun props: Picking flowers, blowing bubbles, eating watermelon or ice cream, catching fireflies, wearing sunglasses, get in close on their toes in the sand or in the grass, kicking water in the surf, hanging out with their dog, swinging on a tire swing, having a race…in other words, let your kids be kids and have some fun watching and photographing it.

4) Action shots: You will want to use a higher shutter speed if your camera is capable of manual settings to capture the action. Perfect for capturing sports games!

5) Portraits: You might consider using an aperture around 4.5 to get the bokeh effect.

Thanks, Kara for sharing with us some helpful tips!

What’s your best advice for taking good pictures? Share in the comments below!