We all suddenly find ourselves at home with a lot of time on our hands. What a great opportunity to document your kiddos when you can’t make immediate plans for professional photo sessions. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be creating some Stay at Home Photography projects you can do with your kids to help bust some boredom and create wonderful memories in the process.
Assignment One – Create a Grid Collage
One of my favorite and fast ways to document my kiddo is one of the easiest. You’ll need the following
- Create Your Set: Find a clean, blank wall perpendicular to a window. You’ll want to do these pictures during a time of day where there’s indirect light, meaning the sun is not shining directly through the window. Turn off the room lighting so that just the light from the window is lighting your subject.
- Get Ready to Edit: Download Google Snapseed for your phone – this is a free image editing app so that you can edit the photos afterward. Snapseed is a robust and easy to use phone editing software. Here’s a tutorial we found to show you around it if you have trouble.
- Design: Download the Layout App by Instagram or the Unfold App. Both of these apps create fun photo collages for your images that you can use on Instagram, social media Stories, and Facebook.
Snap Away!
Take your smart phone and snap away! Try to keep the same distance to your subject and keep the camera angle and orientation the same. We want our photos to stay consistent for the final series. Also make sure you are not using your camera’s flash! Ask your kiddo to smile, make silly faces, shake their hair around, laugh out loud as loud as they can, make a sad face, make an angry face, make a goofy face. Anything you can do to get some different facial expressions will work great.
Select and Edit
Next you’ll want to choose some favorites and edit them all the same way using the Snapseed App. I am partial to black and white so I chose a high contrast black and white look to finish off my images.
Drag and Drop – Design Your Grid
Both of our suggestion apps have an easy to use drag and drop interface. Layout creates square sized collages and Unfold creates collages that best fit Instagram and Facebook Stories. Choose which one works best for where you want to post it, or create both!
Share Your Creations!
Spread a little happiness on the social media feeds with your creations! Tag Kira Derryberry Photography on Facebook and @shekira on Instagram. Hashtag your creations #KDPStayatHome and we will repost! We can’t wait to see what you create!
