Carl Hutzler's Blog

So you are trying to take better pictures of your kids by getting down to their level, but you are finding that you still can’t quite get your point and shoot camera to take the $&#*%!! picture when you press the button! And you start thinking you need a better camera, bigger lenses, etc…maybe even an SLR. Well, the good news is that you likely don’t need to get a new camera as there are some ways to speed up that little point and shoot you already have. Read more

It’s not the camera. It’s the photographer.

Kids are tough to get good pictures of….they don’t sit still….they don’t smile when you ask….and when they do smile, most point and shoot cameras are not fast enough to focus, charge the flash and take the picture in time to capture the moment. But all is not lost.

The most important thing you can do when photographing any person, but especially kids, is to get in close. People like looking at photographs of other people’s faces…its just something about us humans. So get in close and make sure you get your subject to take up a lot of the frame. You can zoom your camera to get closer, or physically move closer. Either way, close is better.

Next up is the angle of view. Most adults stand 5 or 6 feet tall. Most kids are much shorter. When adults snap pictures of their kids, they usually get shots like the one below which makes kids look small and the subject look unengadged in the picture.

Instead, get down to their level. Yes, sit down or crouch or lay down on your belly for really small babies. Now you are operating in their space and you see what they would see if they were to take a picture of a child. It works a lot better as shown in the image below which is very similar to the one above, but more visually pleasing.

In my next post, I will add in some suggestions on how to “capture the moment” by speeding up just about any point and shoot camera.

I worked with a good friend’s two month old (Beckett Rice) for a few hours last week. We did not do anything complicated….just used a single small strobe shot through a white satin umbrella for soft lighting. We began with a black paper backdrop and a soft black velvet blanket (Target $19.95). I think the shots worked well, especially the ones with mom and baby. We added in a Santa hat which actually was from a canine santa costume (Target $7). Then we switched over to a white backdrop and shot some birthday suit action as well as with a blue blanket/blue clothes. I really like the ones where Beckett is staring into the lens. He looks like grown-up. Very cool.

Check them out.

My career at AOL started in May of 1997 as a project manager in our 24×7 Operations team. I was hired by Karl Smith and worked for Scott Gries. At first I was working on Tandem Login/Masterfile and some AIM instant messaging projects. But about 6 months into the job, the PjM who worked on AOL Mail quit. When the lead for Host Mail Development, Jay Levitt, sent a mail to the PjM team and asked who was going to run mail projects in operations, I jumped at the opportunity. AOL Mail is so well known and impacts so many people. “You’ve Got Mail” after all!

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Whoever created the camera flash PC type connector was not an engineer. PC Cord connectors (especially the female side) are very unreliable (hmmm, likely a joke in there somewhere). This is especially problematic for professional photographers who expect their equipment to never fail. One major flaw of the PC connector is that the center connector on the female end is a “split ring” which after a number of uses (plug in, unplug, rinse and repeat) tends to get bent out of shape and tolerance. So the male end does not make good contact any longer. Add in some corrosion from oxidation, etc, and you have guaranteed failure at some point.

Why do SLR camera manufacturers continue to use these instead of something better? I don’t know. Maybe the PC connector is a standard and people expect it. Maybe the people who sell cables for 100x their cost which fail regularly have control? Maybe the connector is a very “low profile” connector making it easy for camera manufacturers to integrate into their camera bodies? Whatever the reason, they stink.

One thing I have noticed, though, is that professional flash systems (big studio strobes) mostly use other types of connectors – either a standard 3.5mm headphone jack (just like your iPod) or what looks like a two prong 120V AC plug (of course, you don’t plug AC into it!).

Recently I bought into a wireless flash sync system called PocketWizard. These are transmitters and receivers (and the newer transcievers) that use RF signals to trigger off-camera flashes. You mount a transmitter on the camera’s hot shoe and the receiver units are connected via cable directly to the flash units. Receiver and flash can be located up to 1500 feet away from the camera/transmitter!

Anyway, the pocketwizard receiver units connect to the flash units via a cord (no magic there). They give you a cord in the pocketwizard receiver box which has a 3.5mm connector on one end which goes into the Pocketwizard and the dreaded PC connector on the other for your flash unit. I used these for a while to connect to the PC connector on my Nikon SB-25 flashes. But one after the other, I found the flashes would start to become unreliable. I wondered if I could yank the PC connector out of the SB-25 Flash and replace it with a 3.5mm headphone plug….turns out not only can you, but it is not really that hard!

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