We’re three weeks into the school year. The Fall is picking up speed. The new shoes are scuffed. Somebody in this house has already lost a jacket. (It was me.)
OK, here’s what’s in this roll
School Picture Day rules from someone who photographs kids for a living
A bonus Six Pics prompt, free, because September is ending
Ideas for the hundred and seventy-eight school days with no obvious photo opp
Here’s what I’ve noticed, photo-wise: I have never seen a single photograph from the third week of school. Typically it’s like, no official occasion? No photo. But I think there’s an opportunity here! Well, a hundred and seventy-eight of them, or so. So exciting. Let’s start today.
Everybody clicks the first day of school. We talked about that. Shoes, backpack. Bookends. Check. And the last day of school, definitely good. Don’t think I won’t have a tip for that day. But now, we get to making good memories out of zilch.
How to take a low-angle photo of your kids with your phone
THE MERRY-GO-ROUND. Timer on. Camera flat on the ground, lens pointing at the sky. Then send the kids running and spinning around it.
And to be clear: you are not spinning the camera. The camera is the only thing here that holds still. The kids orbit, the camera waits. Your phone is the spindle. Everybody else is the record.
You’ll get hair in the breeze, a profile mid-laugh, a blur of legs, somebody’s shoe. Two keepers out of forty is a win!!
Why: it takes the decision away from you entirely. You can’t compose it, you can’t check it, you can’t fix it. All you can do is set the conditions and let it happen. Thirty seconds of not deciding.
It’s also the rare one where nobody has to smile. Almost nothing comes out face-forward, so it doubles as a privacy technique.
And you do not need a lawn for this. It works just as well on a rug, a kitchen floor, a hallway. Which is lucky, because there was a storm up the coast all weekend and I did my test on the living room floor.
A ceiling is a perfectly good background. It's giving… well, nothing!
This prompt is so funnnnn!
I’m doing the real one with all three of my kids tomorrow, look for a how-to reel on IG.
Send me your results and we’ll be even.
And no, my kids aren't in it. I tested this in PJs at night first because I would never hand you something I hadn't tried myself. But the technique REALLY worked, which is why you're reading about it.
A few things that make it work:
Timer on a delay (I did three seconds) so you’ve got time to get out of the frame and get them moving. If your phone will do burst mode, even better. (Live photo and flash both have to be off.)
Lens pointing straight up, not propped at an angle. The upward angle is what makes it look unlike everything else on your phone.
On gravel or sand, put the phone on a book or a jacket. On grass or a rug it’s fine.
Indoors, get the overhead light off and use whatever’s coming in the windows. Overheads throw a color you don’t want, even on a gray day. A rainy afternoon is genuinely lovely light for this.
Tell them to run. Don't mention smiling. “Run around it” and “spin” turn faces away by physics. A kid moving past a fixed camera blurs on their own, and the blur reads as motion rather than a mistake.
Do it at least five times! On burst that's around forty frames.
Go looking for the fragment, not the portrait. Hair, an ear, a chin, a shoe mid-air.
That’s the one you control. Now the one you don’t.
School picture day tips from a photographer
Before school: the outfit
The clothes have to fit. This is the one that beats all the others. Too small or too big is a lose-lose. Even if you love it, even if their heart is set on it, if it doesn’t fit, don’t do it. I will not be taking questions.
No orange. Ever. Even if it’s their favorite color (it’s my son’s). In any lighting, orange casts a weird tone up onto your kid’s skin. Hard pass.
No neons. Hard no.
Skip patterns and logos. They pull attention away from that cutie little face.
Avoid complicated layers. My daughter spent years wanting to wear a cardigan with only the top button buttoned. Great look. But after a trip to school under a jacket, there was no guarantee anybody would get that detail right, and I didn’t want her to be disappointed by a photo she’d been picturing all week. Keep it simple enough to survive a coat.
Before school: the hair
Style it out of their face if you can. It may clash with their personal aesthetic, so do your best, but nudge them toward a style with less unpredictability.
Unless your kid has opinions
Everything above assumes a kid who doesn’t much care what they’re wearing. Plenty of them don’t, especially when they’re little, and in that case the school photo is for you. So follow my rules, get a great and distraction-free face shot that is solid gold.
But some kids care enormously. I was one of them and I still am. So on behalf of baby me: if your kid has a vision for Picture Day, let them have it. Let them choose it, let them be proud of it, even if it is nowhere near what you would have picked. Especially then.
Because in that case the photo isn’t for you. It’s for THEM. And a kid who got to decide how they showed up, and liked how they looked doing it, beats a photo that coordinates with your living room. It might do wonders for their confidence, and that is priceless.
In the car: the pep talk, since you can’t be there to micromanage
Tell them to tell their friend in line a funny joke as they are walking into the gym. Being in a good mood is a great start. Need some jokes? I get mine from the Primal Meats beef jerky wrappers, and they’re gold. “What do you call a room with no doors? A mushroom!”
And after all that prep? Take the pressure off. It’s all for fun. We take a million pictures ourselves every year (true!), so if this one isn’t great, so what?
And the one that actually fixes it
Take your own picture-day photo. Snap their outfit yourself that morning, in your own doorway, and then let the official one be good or bad.
Because school photos aren’t the record. They’re a receipt. The real photos are the ones your family takes.
Send me your September photos for The Six
Three days left in September, and then these prompts get their own room behind a door.
Here’s what I actually want, and I’ve been asking for it wrong. Send me the ones with nobody in them. Your four o’clock wall. The shoes by the door. The thing your kid outgrew. The light doing something in a room you’ve stopped looking at.
I know that asking you to send me a photograph of your child is a big ask from a person you’ve never met. I wouldn’t do it either. A picture of a wall, though. That we can do.
Just hit reply. This email comes to me and nowhere else, which I suspect is the part that matters.
Sending it means I might feature it here, with your first name or without it. Tell me which and I’ll do that.
And, guys, you know exactly how low this bar is: you already saw my merry-go-round test pic. It's mid. I kept it anyway!
October’s Six lands Monday the 5th, and one prompt is always free.
Meme of the week
I will forever be looking to see if I can recreate this. I will be deep-knee bending to get a low angle now on ALL weeds. In case art is afoot. And I love that the caption is just completely earnest grass facts!
So that’s September. I asked a few hundred people to take six photographs, and then spent four weeks finding out what anybody would actually do with that.
Here’s where I’ve landed. I’ve started something over on Instagram called Ode to the Ordinary, where I film the least remarkable parts of my day and stitch them together anyway. I started it by accident, sitting in the car one day thinking a video looking up at the trees would be cool. And now it’s a thing that I’m having so much fun with!
This week’s ordinary bits are reporting live from a rainy, stormy Saturday and a basement reorganization: Lego demolition, FaceTimes with loved ones, leaving the house only for cookies, the kids wiggling their wiggles out, loudly.
None of it is an occasion. That’s exactly why I keep it. The occasions take care of themselves.
Week three is an ode to the ordinary, you see, and so is a snoozefest Thursday. So is the walk to the school drop-off you’ve done a zillion times without looking up. So is disassembling thirty-seven half-forlorn, formerly loved Legos into a bin, where they'll soon get their second (900th?) life from two eager hands.
So I think that's just what I do now. I point the camera up and I see what happens.
These are a type of photo prompt, one you don’t mind sharing. And if you make one, tag it #odetotheordinary and I’ll come and find it.
Go get one before the month runs out!
hugs!!
Ana