How to Take the Best Father's Day Photos

On Fox News Channel today, I gave Father’s Day photography tips to new Fox and Friends host, Pete Hegseth. We showed pictures he has taken of his kids, and my job was to explain ways to improve them.

Click here for a video replay of the segment

We had prepared the segment to also show pictures of my children. This would have demonstrated the best techniques to photograph your children. Unfortunately breaking news out of Dallas forced the segment to be cut short, and we only showed pictures of Pete’s kids.

As a single dad and sole parent of 5 kids for almost 20 years now and as the owner of NJ’s biggest and coolest camera store, finding pictures of my children that illustrates any photography technique is easy. I have lots of them, and it’s a labor of love.

Here’s my Father’s Day present to you all - a more detailed explanation of the photography tips, with some recent pictures of my kids, to help you take great pictures of your children - for Father's Day or any day.

Pete Picture 1: Pete and Family at Heinz Field for a Football Game:

Problem: Not lighted properly making it harder to see faces and expressions and half light and dark faces

Matt Picture 1: Three Daughters at College Graduation

Solution: Use Fill-Flash. Force your smartphone or camera to fire the flash even in daylight. It fills in the faces. If you use a real camera (not a phone) the camera balances the flash so other parts will also be exposed correctly too. And with a real camera you can defocus the background making the subjects the focal point of the image.

Pete Picture 2: Selfie with Son in Times Square

Problem: Subjects blocking location and the background is overexposed making it hard to see where you are (which is the point of a selfie).

Matt Picture 2: Selfie with daughter in Washington DC and Jefferson Memorial

Solution: Take a selfie from higher angle. Raise the camera up so that the light of background image is better balanced with faces and hold the camera far enough away to capture a better composition of location.

Pete Picture 3: Two Sons Sitting on Steps

Problem: Faces out of focus, junk in background (chairs, railings, etc.) and fence coming out of subject’s head.

Matt Picture 3: Two Sons in Fun Pose

Solution: Use a real camera, not a phone. You will achieve better focus. Use a wide open aperture (low f-stop number) to defocus the background. This removes the distracting elements from the picture.

Happy Father’s Day to you all.

Create Better Pictures.

Want to have Matt speak to your audience? Inspirational keynote speeches are a click away at MSweetwood.com. 

About Matt: Over the past two decades, Matt Sweetwood has become the nation’s leading advocate for single dads everywhere. In 1996, after his wife’s personality disorder turned violent, Matt was awarded full custody of their five children ages 18 months to 8 years old. Since then, he raised his children on his own, gaining expertise in a range of single parenting and custody issues, including dating while caring for children and the legal, social, academic, and institutional prejudices against men who are single parents. Today Matt’s children are grown, and he is currently writing his first book, a free-ranging and heartfelt memoir of his experiences.

In his professional life, Matt serves as President of Unique Photo?, NJ’s premiere Camera Store. Nationally known in the photography industry as an innovator, he has helped acquire over fifty US and International Trademarks for both language and design at Unique Photo, and he founded and ran the Ozzie Award winning publication Photo Insider?. Most recently, Matt has been credited with the reinvention of the modern camera store, as well as the country’s largest in-store education program, the Unique University?. Unique Photo was named “2013 Dealer of the Year” by Digital Imaging Reporter magazine.

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