You don't need to be a professional photographer to take great pictures and videos of your child. All you need is an easy-to-use digital camera and a plan to use it at regular intervals.
San Francisco mom Susan Doering can pinpoint exactly when her kids Amelia and Finn started walking, growing teeth, wearing Mommy's and Daddy's shoes, and riding a tricycle. That's because she takes thousands of photos of her children during the year and has amassed a thorough record of their growth and progress.
"When the milestones happen, you think you will always vividly remember not only what happened but when," says Doering, a stay-at-home mom and former product manager for Adobe's Photoshop and Kodak Gallery. "But a few years down the road, everything is foggy. For me and my children, photos and videos give us windows into the people we were."
How to capture the images
If you're the type who finds it hard to remember to whip out the camera, consider picking the same day every month, or a time that something happens on a regular basis — like doctor's appointments — to take pictures or videos. If you have older children, snap some shots of them enjoying activities that they do several times during the year — their baseball games or ballet recitals, for example. That way you'll have regular updates of their growth.
Don't forget to make short videos, too. Being able to see and hear what's going on in these records of their childhood is precious.
During pregnancy, you can turn the camera on yourself to share your hopes and dreams for your baby. She'll enjoy watching this footage one day. Once she's born, you'll document not only how she grows and changes and uses her body in fascinating new ways, but you'll also preserve the moments when she learns to babble and then form words.
Later on, when your kids are in grade school, you can help them record their own hopes and dreams — maybe in the form of a video letter to Grandma every month.
But whatever you do, Doering says, take lots of pictures as often as you can. With digital cameras, you can always delete pictures later, but you can never go back and capture the photos that you didn't manage to take in the first place.
How to choose your equipment
Camera phones. As the cameras built into cell phones have gotten better, more and more people are using the camera on their phone as their only camera. Camera phone pictures can uploaded to Facebook and downloaded onto your computer and edited using your photo software. Both Windows and Mac operating systems have free basic photo-editing software. And free online editing programs are also available.
"Point-and-shoot" cameras. These small digital cameras are ideal for most family photo needs. You can slip one of them into a diaper bag or pocket for those times when you're out and about and your baby takes her first step or your child finally gets the hang of riding a two-wheeler.
A point-and-shoot camera has very few manual controls, which makes it easy to use. And, unlike the old point-and-shoots, the newer generation of digital cameras can usually shoot video with sound, too.
In fact, the quality of point-and-shoot digital cameras has gotten so good that even professionals use them when they're "off duty." San Francisco Chronicle photographer Mike Kepka slips one into the diaper bag when traveling with his wife and 2-year-old daughter for a weekend getaway.
The three types of point-and-shoots. Very thin and portable subcompacts ($140 to $300) are often the most stylish-looking cameras, but they won't generally give you any manual features or more than 3x optical zoom (a feature that makes your subject appear closer than he really is). (Avoid digital zoom, which almost always degrades image quality. If your camera has this feature turned on, turn it off in the menu.)
Subcompacts are fine for focusing up to 15 feet away, though, whether your subject is your toddler mashing bananas into her highchair across the table or your second-grader building a fort in front of the couch.
Compacts ($100 to $450) are bigger and chunkier but you can get more zoom (generally 3x to 6x). That's enough to zoom in on your child kicking a ball even when you're standing across the soccer field.
These models usually include some manual features, such as the ability to set the shutter speed to freeze the action, which can eliminate blurred shots.
Superzoom cameras are bigger yet in size, and they offer even more zoom — usually 10x or more. So, if you're shooting across the soccer field, you can zoom in and create a portrait of your child. But all of that zooming in also magnifies your hand's shakiness, and that can make for a lot of blurry photos, points out Consumer Reports' Sullivan. Consequently, many superzoom cameras have an "image stabilization" feature to offset the effect of small movement. (Many compacts and subcompacts are now shipping with image stabilization as well.)
SLR cameras. If you're willing to do the work to get really great pictures, you'll want a single-lens reflex camera, also called an SLR ($400 to $5,000 and up). Even beginners can get good pictures with an SLR. Until you learn your camera's features, you can set it on "automatic" and use it like a point-and-shoot.
You're probably already familiar with the whir of an SLR camera if you've ever taken your child to have a portrait made at a professional studio. Jennifer DeBord, mother of a toddler in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, uses her SLR to snap multiple snapshots per second of her daughter. "I get some surprisingly good photos — smiles in the midst of what I thought was a grumpy moment," she says.
She's also enjoyed some serendipity — like the series of shots in which a family cat made a surprise appearance, perfectly poised. "Posing both infants and cats is an exercise in futility," she says.
When to switch to a camcorder
Shooting video is easier than ever with many point-and-shoot cameras, but camcorders are also getting simpler to use. Many are small enough to carry everywhere, and you just press one button to record.
You may want to consider one of these if you have an older point-and-shoot that doesn't have video. Even the technology-obsessed love the simplicity of this camcorder. Susan Doering and husband Kevin Ellis often leave their expensive, hard-to-set-up camcorders on the shelf and grab the Flip to shoot video of their kids.
In bright light, the Flip or a digital camera will do a decent job of recording. When the lights are low, however, the Flip and other point-and-shoots don't do so well.
What this means, according to Consumer Reports' Sullivan, is that if you want great video of a dimly lit ballet recital or you'd like to capture the moment that your kid blows out the candle on her birthday cake in a room where all of the lights are out, you really should invest in a more sensitive camcorder.
You can choose from two different types: regular definition and high definition (HD). Both work just fine in low-light situations, but the HD camera will always capture more color and details. If you shoot in HD, though, you'll need a powerful computer, editing software, and a monitor capable of displaying HD to get the full effect.
Because HD is a relatively new product, the dust hasn't yet settled in terms of which format will dominate the marketplace. So, make sure before you buy that the camcorder you've chosen uses a format you can easily edit at home with Final Cut, Premiere, or another computer editing program.
And while you're preserving memories for your children to enjoy when they're adults, remember they may want to take pictures themselves. Susan Doering gave her 4-year-old daughter a little digital camera designed for children. "Kids take the best photos!"
