Ask any portraitist or advanced (amateur/professional/hobbyist) photographer and they’d tell you that the hardest subject to take a picture of is a kid.

There are several reasons for this.  The most obvious is that kids have short attention spans.  Another reason is that it’s hard to give directions to kids, as a rule, they don’t follow.  Worse is if the kid is old enough and likes to ham it up before the camera.

However, one viewpoint I can present for this is that the photographer doesn’t have the time to take the shot.  For all the photographer’s preparations, the kid will not cooperate.  Composition is an exercise in dynamics.  In this context, taking pictures of kids is like taking pictures of a fast-paced sports event, or of a photojournalism assignment.  Just a little bit more frustrating because you want to finish the shot as soon as possible.

Patience is a virtue.  Specially when it comes to kids as photo subjects.  Seriously.  The best way to take a kid’s picture is to wait. and wait very patiently.  The alternative is to keep on shooting.  There’s got to be a good shot in there sometime.  When using film there seems that there’s not enough film in the camera.  And it’s a good thing digital cameras came along.

An old rule of thumb for professional photographers, is that out of three rolls of film (each of 36 shots), you’ve be lucky to have one very good picture.  That’s roughly one shot in a hundred.  With careful composition, and lots of patience, this number can be trimmed down to one good picture for every roll.  If you’re not picky, you can just choose one out of every ten. This is particularly true of kids.

However, when using a digital camera and playing with those numbers it just makes lots of sense to keep on shooting.  Of course, when you do that, there would be less composition, more pictures which are off-focus and blurred, you might not have the depth of field you want, and other problems.  The numbers would go up just to find that one picture.  And then you go back to the original problem:  how many pictures of ears and napes does it take before you get that one good picture with the distinctive facial expression?

Me, I’d rather wait, and wait patiently, with the camera aimed at the subject, taking the shot inside my head before taking a picture.   I have found that this is more fun than the shotgun approach.