Shooting Kids and Dogs on Their Level
Okay. We've done low. We've done close. Today we put both of those together on the two subjects that actually move: kids and dogs.
Here's the thing about kids and dogs. They're already at a lower level than you. A toddler's face is somewhere around your knees. A dog's face, unless you've got a Great Dane, is somewhere around your shins. And what do most people do? Stand at their own eye level, point the phone down, and shoot straight into the top of a head.
That's the boring photo. That's the one where the kid looks like a smudge and the dog looks like a loaf of bread. You've seen a thousand of these. You've probably taken a thousand of these. I have.
Get down to where they live
This is the actual lesson, and it's not complicated, it's just uncomfortable. You have to get your body down to their level. Knees on the floor. Sometimes flat on your stomach. I've laid on my kitchen floor to photograph a dog eating, which is not a dignified way to spend an afternoon, but the photo was worth it.
When your phone is at the kid's eye level, or the dog's eye level, everything changes. You see their actual face instead of the top of a head. You get the room or the yard behind them at a normal angle instead of looking down at a floor. It reads like you were with them instead of hovering over them.
Try this at home: 1. Find your kid or your dog doing basically anything, sitting, playing, eating a snack they're not supposed to have. 2. Get your knees on the ground. If that's not physically doable for you, a low stool or even sitting on the floor works fine, the point is getting the phone down, not the yoga. 3. Tap to focus on the face. We've drilled this one already, so you know where to tap. 4. Take the shot. Then take it again from slightly different spot, closer, farther, a little to the side. Remember, the first one is almost never it.
The moving-target problem
Kids and dogs don't hold still for you. This is where getting low gets harder, because you're down on the ground trying to track a subject that's currently sprinting toward the sliding door.
My advice, and I say this a lot: don't chase the shot, wait for it. If you know your dog does the same lap around the yard every five minutes, get low, get set, and wait for the lap instead of scrambling after them mid-run. Same with kids. If you know your daughter always climbs up on the same chair to watch you cook, get down at that chair's level before she gets there.
Lily, my youngest, is the one who taught me this, sort of by accident. She took a photo of our dog a while back that was better than anything I'd shot all week, and I genuinely sat there studying it trying to figure out what she'd done. She hadn't done anything fancy. She'd just flopped down on the floor because that's just how a twelve-year-old sits, and the phone ended up right at dog-eye-level. I started doing it on purpose after that. Kids stumble into good instincts sometimes. Worth paying attention to.
Where this fights you: shiny stuff and low light
Two honest problems.
One, if you're shooting a dog's collar tag, or a kid's shiny new bike, or anything with metal or glare, getting low sometimes puts you right in the path of a window reflection or overhead light bounce. I still don't have a clean fix for this. I've been trying to get a decent photo of the binding on a finished quilt, that little diagonal miter at the corner, for longer than I'd like to admit. It's small, it's shiny, and it beats me every single time. Some things you just keep trying on.
Two, kids and dogs move around fast, and low light plus fast movement is a rough combination on a phone camera. If the room's dim and the dog won't stop wiggling, you're going to get blur no matter how good your angle is. Move toward the window. Turn the overhead off if there's daylight coming in instead. Light is still the whole game, even down here on the floor.
One safety note, not to be a nag about it, but if you're getting low around a dog that's excited or a toddler that's climbing on things, watch where your knees and elbows are. I've nearly gotten stepped on by my own kid mid-shot more than once. Worth a laugh after, not worth a sprained wrist.
Before next time
Get one photo of your kid or your dog from their actual eye level this week, even if it means lying on the floor for it. Send it to me if you want, I do this all the time with my own family and I never get tired of seeing what people come back with. ❤️