How to Photograph Kids & Their Toys

Kids love their toys. Some become very attached to them and always seem to be surrounded by them.

Photographing children with their toys is a good way to make very touching photographs as well as including your children in the project.

However the project is not just simply having a child stand next to their toys and taking a photo. You have to add creativity to the project in order to separate your images from just plain "snapshots".

The first thing to do is to gather a large number of your child's favorite toys and arrange them around the child. It should almost appear as if the child is in the middle of a mountain of toys.

You need to seek different angles as well as perspectives to make the images stand out. or example a good scene for a boy who happens to love toy cars is to have the child lay on the ground and surround him with his toy cars.

A girl who loves barbies can be posed right in the middle while she is surrounded from top to bottom with her dolls. You can use some boxes stacked on top of each other have to make what appears to be a frame. The child is in the middle of the "frame" and the dolls are placed in all the boxes cavities.

lets say you have a child who loves action figures. Dress the child in a costume resembling some of the ones which are featured by his action figures.

Have the child lay on the ground as if he is stalking the "enemy", yet brought along his buddies which consist of his action figures and are posed to mimic his pose. For a scene like this one you should photograph the set up from eye level.

For all of the images you need to carefully crop, even if the cropping eliminates some toys from the scene. The best photographs are those that are closeups of the child's expression with especial emphasis on the eyes.

Some good photographs can be made with just some toys or photographing the child attentively playing. Don't interrupt your child if he or she is playing with toys and is totally immense in the activity.

In this case photograph the interaction as unobtrusively as possible and avoid using flash as candid photographs can make for some really nice moments captured on film, or as your case may be, a sensor.