Graduation album is one of those things that will keep the memory of the school years. That is why it is necessary not only to choose a photographer, suitable costumes and a place, but also to choose good poses for a photo shoot.

Early preparation for a photo shoot

• Prepare your clothes and shoes. Choose a set of clothes that fits well and emphasizes all the advantages. It is not necessary to choose a school uniform or things in classical style. You can choose an elegant set, but you should focus on the general theme that the photographer will select. If you find it difficult to choose a suitable outfit, consult with loved ones.
• Prepare the body, hair and face.
• Get enough sleep. In order to look good in photographs, you need to feel cheerful and fresh. In addition, lack of sleep affects not only well-being, but also appearance. And this will nullify all your ideas for photography.
• Take a cool shower in the morning that will charge good mood and cheerfulness.

How to pose for a graduation album

• There is no need to be afraid of anything, try to relax and be liberated as much as possible. Of course, this is not an easy task, but it is necessary to strive for it.
• Before the photo session, rehearse several poses and choose the most successful of them. Try to remember the facial expression. You can even make small sketches for yourself. A great option is to print your favorite photos from the Internet and try to reproduce them at a photo shoot.

Posing in front of the camera. Instructional video

How to behave during a private photo session

• Chat with the photographer. To obtain beautiful pictures, the photographer and the model must find a common language. If the photographer asks you about something, try to give the most complete answer. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask. Perhaps the poses that you have been training at home for so long do not look very good from the outside. Or maybe you can offer ideas and poses that the photographer will find very interesting.
• Smile. A sincere smile goes to any person, so smile as often as possible during a photo shoot. The main thing is not to do it through force, so that the smile does not turn into an ugly grimace.
• Don't be afraid to fantasize. Choosing good posture for shooting, think about what things you can take with you to do beautiful photo. Perhaps you are fond of playing the guitar or boxing. It makes sense to take them with you so that the photos turn out interesting and original. The photographer will be delighted with this idea.

How to behave during a group photo session

• Don't squirm. Young people love to stand out from the crowd. Do not make faces for this during a photo shoot. Such a photo will not be included in the graduation album anyway, so you will only waste the photographer's time.
• Suggest ideas for photos. Graduation album group photography can be done at classroom, dining room, assembly and sports hall. Perhaps your class has some ideas and special places where you liked to spend your free time. Be sure to take a photo with them so that the memory remains.

Choosing an idea and interesting poses for photography is not an easy task, but you need to approach this with all responsibility. And you need to do this the night before, and not during the photo shoot.

If you have been working as a children's photographer for a long time, then you will find an increase in orders for school photography, because children grow up, and parents prefer to work with a proven specialist.

On the one hand, this is good, because you don’t need to spend money on advertising, and you can even earn more on school shootings than in kindergarten- the classes are quite numerous now. But at school, the photographer faces a number of serious problems which never occur when shooting preschoolers.
First, at school, you most likely will not be allowed to interfere with the learning process and distract children.
Secondly, lighting a classroom is more difficult than small play areas in a kindergarten.
Thirdly, the older children get, the more difficult it is to get them interested in the shooting process. High school students may defiantly turn away from the camera, interfere with photography, or outright refuse to participate in it.
But, perhaps, the main problem of shooting is the monotony of the school learning process. Almost all the time, children are at their desks, engaged in the same type of activity.

Physical education lessons are also unpredictable. In large halls, several classes can study at the same time, difficult lighting conditions, the complete dependence of the result on the mood and plans of the physical education teacher, as well as the children themselves in adolescence become angular, control their bodies worse and photos in motion are not always as aesthetic, like photographing preschoolers.

Another big disadvantage is that at certain ages, due to the restructuring of the body, children's faces require such an amount of retouching that is comparable only to wedding shooting, respectively, the profitability will be very low, since a lot of money will be spent on paying for the work of a retoucher.

Let's start solving these problems one by one.

First, you need to decide on your preferred ages and try to shoot them.

For example, for us, it is preferable to shoot 1-2 classes, which are ordered very rarely. In order to receive such orders, actively announce that you are filming schoolchildren on September 1st. For such key queries, parents will definitely search for you and there will be many requests.
It is clear that on this day you will already be busy, but during telephone conversations you can convince parents that shooting on September 1 is a waste of money, but shooting one day at school is a very interesting and valuable story about how a child is already began to study at school, as he explores new territory, found new friends.
It is better to organize such shootings at the end of September - the beginning of October, when the children have already had time to fully adapt to school, have time to make friends, and most importantly, that the leading activity for children at this age is education, which is why they react so vividly and emotionally in the lessons, they are interested and like to study.

Parents who ordered you to shoot first graders will definitely contact you at the end of the 4th grade to take a photo shoot for graduation albums in primary school. Tell them ahead of time that these types of shots are best done at the beginning of 4th grade - as long as there is good light and interesting backgrounds for shooting children outside. At the end of the year, as a rule, children are already tired, they have a lot of tests, and all good children's photographers are overloaded with orders during this period. The next stream of calls to you will be in the senior graduating classes.
I personally refuse requests from parents and advise that the issue of photography and choosing a photographer be discussed by the children themselves. Although the 11th grade is already difficult to call children :) For three years now, high school students have been calling me, who themselves coordinate the time of photo shoots, collect money, choose photos for photo books, make illustrations for their design and even assist on the set.
Here is an example of spreads from a school book that I made 3 years ago. The school on the cover is a drawing by one of the students in this class.
Since the shooting was not carried out in Moscow and the territorial factor, which is so significant for the capital, was absent (large distances), we decided to shoot in several passes, literally one hour each.

Now a little about lighting.

In classrooms, ideally, it is better to shoot without overhead light and additionally illuminate with flashes. This is another reason to organize shooting in the fall or spring. Unfortunately, lamps that give a terrible yellow-green tint are quite common in schools.
A good solution is to highlight some kind of filming area(it is possible to ask for a separate office, in the back desks or even in the corridor), highlight it and shoot in a conveyor mode, dividing the children into groups according to the principle - who is friends with whom. It is good to place standard study guides(books, maps, globes, you can search for more sophisticated equipment like microscopes and skeletons).
The essence of the conveyor approach is that by taking children in groups, in a short period of time, you can shoot several diverse scenes at once - both individual portraits and portraits in activity, group interactions that can be activated by competitive moments. For example, who will be the first to find Africa on the globe?

Such photos will dilute the monotonous school report and are a very good reason for creating combined photo books.
School, unlike kindergarten, is a place where strong friendships are formed, sometimes for life. Children and parents want to see in the books not only their children, but also their friends, and the life of the class, general photographs, some kind of photo story about the school as a whole. They end up wanting a big book for little money.

The ideal solution is to create a combined book, where 3 spreads will be individual, and the rest will be the same for the whole class (that is, the work on book layout is minimized, which means that these books are much cheaper than completely personal books for 10 spreads). At the same time, the individual beginning of the photo book (3 personal spreads) makes this book unique and inimitable, plus the effect of the first impression - when viewing the book, parents first see their child, and then supplement this impression with a general picture.

Exude freshness. Don't forget that personal hygiene is just as important as a great smile in a photo. You need to take a shower and wash before showing everyone snow-white teeth.

• If you usually take a shower in the evenings, then set aside some time for this procedure on the morning of your photo shoot. Then your skin will look even better.
• If you don't wear make-up, then just wash your face shortly before you are photographed.
• Wash your hair so it's shiny, not greasy.

Each of us long wants to leave in his memory school years, and for this, most often, he takes a school photo that is valuable to him. This topic will always be relevant, so I decided to tell you how to take pictures at school.

This instruction is suitable not only for photographing children at school, but also for photographing for a diploma.

Let's start with necessary equipment. First, we need several lenses. For example, a standard lens, as a rule, depending on the model of the camera, the focal length there may be different, most often it is 18-55 mm. or 18-105 mm. To diversify the photo a little, a lens such as a fish-eye will come in handy. It gives the picture a kind of bulge - the effect of the "barrel", which is very popular with modern schoolchildren. In addition, with the help of "Fish eye" it is convenient to take pictures large group of people. The second lens we need is called a "portrait lens" - a lens with a focal length of 100 mm. It is perfect for creating a frame with one subject photographed. In addition, we need other lenses. We also need a regular wide-angle lens of 18-40 mm., We will need it for photographing a group of people.

Photographing at school with a fisheye lens

Secondly, we can not do without a few outbreaks. I recommend purchasing two. They will be needed in order to make the portrait smooth and soft. For this, I also recommend that you buy at least one flash box.

Thirdly, pay attention to the presence of additional equipment: reflector, flash synchronizer, tripod, background, etc.

The synchronizer is needed so that the flashes respond to the camera. Separately from it, they will not work, and since there are several flashes, the wired system will not work for us.

We need at least three tripods: for the reflector, for the camera and one in order to hold the background.

The background can be taken in a neutral color, or you can pick up something more interesting, for example, a golden background. It is rare, but with it the photographs acquire the greatest expressiveness.

Consider step-by-step instructions for arranging light when forming a high-quality portrait.

I highlighted this point not by chance, here I will tell you in more detail where we need flashes and a reflector.

Step 1. Where should the light sources be.

So, we have several light sources: 2 flashes, a synchronizer and a reflector. It is necessary to arrange these devices so that the photographed object is illuminated from all sides. Imagine: in the center is our model, in front of her you are a photographer. To your right is a flash in the box, to your left is a reflector; Another flash is attached above the background, directing light on the subject being photographed. This arrangement of elements is the simplest and at the same time effective for creating a good photo.

The reflector and the flash, on the sides of the photographer, should be placed so that they not only look at each other, but also fall on the child, for example 45 degrees. This gives maximum light flow on the sides of the model and in front of it. The flash on top of the background allows us to light up the head of the subject, which makes the frame more expressive.

In the figure below, I will show you how this arrangement of all the objects and elements necessary for the photo should look like.

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How to photograph children at school?

When all the devices and devices are ready for photography, you can go directly to work with people, in our case, schoolchildren.

So, the first and most important thing is to make a portrait of each student individually. I recommend that you show the resulting frame to the student. If he likes it, he will say “yes”, so at the initial stage the photo is ready.

So, on average, one child will take up to 7 minutes of time, or even more. Considering that there can be 25 children in the class, the photo shoot process can take more than two hours. That is why I recommend taking pictures of each class on a separate day and planning the process of taking pictures in advance.

You, as a specialist, are obliged to help the child with a pose for photographing. Mostly, for each it should be its own. First, you can ask the guys to pose for the camera on their own. At the same time, you will take a few shots, if you can’t choose anything suitable from them, recommend your poses to the guys and take a few more shots.

For every photographer, there are a few simple but very important rules for working with the school team.

1. Your model in the frame should feel confident. Therefore, try to convince the student that he looks good (especially for high school students - girls).
2. Try to insist that the teacher warn the parents of the students in advance about the next photo session for them. This is necessary so that parents can prepare their child: dress beautifully, give the necessary advice and recommendations. Otherwise, unpleasant misunderstandings may arise.
3. I urge you to listen to the opinion of teachers on how to photograph a school class. Perhaps they have their own ideas about this, and you just need to implement them.
4. When all the photos are ready, you must agree them with the customer, in our case, with a teacher or one of the parent activists. With them, you need to discuss all the details of the photo again: the plot, quality, size, cost, to find out if everything suits them. They should also clarify the names and surnames of each student depicted in the photo. This is necessary when forming a school album or photo, where the names of the children will be indicated. If you incorrectly write down the name of the child shown in the picture, then the error will make itself felt when printing, and it is you who will bear the losses for damaged photos or albums.

In addition, you will need to take photographs of children on the street, school grounds. Therefore, study the weather forecast in advance - in the rain you will not get beautiful pictures. So take into account the fact that the sun can interfere with the uniform illumination of the object, for this explain to the group where it is better to stand.

After studying this article, we come to the conclusion that for photographing at school we will need to take a large number of equipment, carefully prepare and spend a lot of time to create the desired result. And you will get the photos you need if you follow this simple instruction.

At first glance, everyday portrait photography is the simplest photographic job. But this is only at first glance. I had a chance to shoot at schools and kindergartens for several years. A beginner with a good theoretical background and practice, say, reportage shooting, may take more than one month to establish a more or less correct technological cycle. Only after that, the number of photos not redeemed by parents will be set at about six percent.

It will take about two years to win back your own piece of space in the world of children's institutions, where you can sustainably earn your daily bread and at the same time hope that the director of "your school" will not give himself up to another, more successful, more skilled or more generous photographer.

Work does not begin with shooting, but with finding a job. The photographer has to comb through residential areas, getting refusal after refusal, until he persuades some director of the children's institution to let him go to the "trough" - and then you have to be in full combat readiness.
Manufacturing process requires careful organization. The fact is that you can spend only one lesson on a photo shoot of one class. And not every teacher agrees to disrupt his lesson. The photo shooting schedule is usually compiled for more than one day, and if something suddenly breaks in the mechanism in the course of work, it is not easy to return the process to the established course. That is why the observance of the rhythm is one of the most important components of the technology of work at school. There are twenty-five to forty-five students in a class. The lesson lasts forty-five minutes. Therefore, the photographer has only one minute for each portrait. Sometimes more than four hundred people have to be photographed in a day.
Portable studio in a miniature version consists of two studio flashes with leading halogen lamps, two photo umbrellas, a reflector screen (light disk), a background and five support stands.
The studio is usually installed right in the school corridor. A fabric background is hung on racks near the wall. A chair with a low back is attached to the floor in any way possible for you.
If this is not done, then exactly half of the time allotted for filming the class will be spent on a senseless struggle with the desire of each child to find a new, more suitable place for the chair.
And in no case should this be allowed, since this will change the distance from the chair to the background and from the source of the key light to the student's face.
The minimum flash output is 150 joules. Well, if there is the possibility of dividing the power in half. The flash should be ready to fire almost immediately after firing. The ten seconds it takes to charge some flashes is too long. The change house does not tolerate such pauses.
A stand with a flash and a photo umbrella, which should provide key light, must be installed once and for all at a certain distance from the head of the person being portrayed. To do this, you can start a measuring tape, and draw a sector of a circle on the floor with chalk. If necessary, along this line it will be possible to move the flash stand during operation, without wasting precious seconds on repeated exposure measurements. I put the key light on my left. The counter also needs to be kept in a strictly defined place. In this scheme, he not only highlights the hair and shoulders, but also the background. That is why it makes sense for him to adapt a small photo umbrella.
It is very important to keep the once calculated positions of the flashes, the chair and the background unchanged. It is known that the illumination of an object decreases in inverse proportion to the square of the distance to the light source. It is enough to move the flash away from the child’s face by thirty centimeters or lean forward, and the distance from the light source to the person being portrayed will change by thirty percent. In practice, this will lead to a very noticeable difference in the densities of adjacent frames. No printer will bother with each frame separately. At good photographer all files are the same in density and contrast. The bad one has everything mixed up, both underexposed and overexposed. Operators are forced to fiddle with the correction of each portrait, losing time. Good printers-operators do not work with bad photographers. For the right to work with them, the photographer must fight, compete.
Through trial and error, I came to the conclusion that it is best to use an aluminized photo umbrella in school (white cloth scatters light too much and devours a lot of energy, while the aperture drops to 5.6). An aluminized umbrella with a diameter of 100 cm reflects a lot of light and gives a distinct black and white pattern with soft transitions from light to shadow. A flash turned on at a power of 150 J at a distance from the umbrella to the child's eyes of 130 cm gives aperture 8 (film-matrix sensitivity 100 ASA). To move such an umbrella more than thirty meters from the eyes of the person being portrayed is bad. At the same time, it ceases to give a soft light and shade pattern, and it is not worth using an umbrella of a larger diameter, since it takes up too much space, blocking off half of the recreational corridor. Children at recess break loose, rush like meteors, now and then knocking down the fence of chairs built around the studio. It costs them nothing to fill up any of the flashes on the floor. Therefore, at breaks, shooting stops, the photographer retrains as a security guard.
Ideally, the key light should be placed so that it does not have to be moved too often during the shooting. The height of the middle of the umbrella should be about 20 cm above the head of the person being portrayed, and the angle should be 45 degrees to the axis of the lens. Naturally, the flash will have to be raised when shooting graduates and lowered when shooting first-graders.
The light reflector (light disc) should be placed to the right of the photographer, 40 cm from the child's shoulder. You should not push it further - there will be gaps in the shadows. The exposure difference in highlights and shadows on the face should ideally be 0.7 f-stops.
The light must be set so that the aperture is clamped to 8. At the same time, the depth of field of the portrait lens becomes optimal: the eyes are sharp, and the ears are floating. Opening a hole is even more bad, because there is no margin of depth of field, and in the event of the slightest mistake, you can get a marriage. Given the pace of shooting, it's best not to risk it.
The lens should allow you to shoot a half-length portrait from an arm's length. This is important, because now and then children have to straighten shirt collars, ties, and bangs. Portrait lenses are distinguished by their soft pattern, shallow depth of field, and usually large aperture. The latter is very important: if the lens is dark, the eye will not last long. Focus on the eyes four hundred times a day, and so on for several days in a row ... It won’t seem enough. When shooting a class, turn off autofocus and frame the frame so that the head of the person being portrayed occupies three-quarters of the frame, there is not too much of the body, and there is a small amount of blurred background above the head. Now focus on the child's eyes and seal the focusing ring with tape. The main thing is that the scale of the image of the heads does not change in the process of work. When they all come together on one cool vignette, heads of different sizes will look ugly. You will have to focus by changing the position of your own head: either approaching the client’s eyes, or moving away from them. Not very convenient, but the product is guaranteed standard at the output. Another important little thing. At the moment of shooting, the camera mirror is raised, and you lose sight of the person for a brief moment. And it is at this moment that he strives to blink. If after shooting you find two or three “blinkers” in each class, you can assume that you will no longer work in this school or kindergarten. There is only one way to avoid this during the shooting: you need to look with one eye into the lens, and with the other - directly at the child and in double if necessary. To insure against mistakes, now and then looking at the digital display, is not an option - the pace of work gets lost.
I photographed the kids sitting on a chair. This saved energy, since the height of the lens during the shooting turned out to be optimal: just above the level of the child's eyes. The chair was turned in the direction of the drawing light so that the child, sitting down, directed his knees directly to the umbrella, and turned his head towards me. The pose turned out a little more dynamic than when shooting for a passport.
On the eve of shooting, children usually receive a lot of “useful” advice from their parents.
A trained child, sitting on a chair in front of the photographer, inflates like a bubble, begins to straighten her hair, collar, chew her own lips, or gives out such a wry smile that it is just right to burst out laughing. A lot in this case depends on the behavior of the photographer. You can't let a child recover. As soon as you sit him down and straighten his hair and clothes yourself, immediately ask him some stupid question that has nothing to do with shooting, but requires a switch of attention. For example: “How much will kvazhda kva?”, “What is your cat’s name?”, “Turn your nose a little to the left?” etc.
You should have quite a lot of such blanks in stock so that for each next child the question is unexpected. Children usually stand in line near the studio and watch everything that happens like a small performance in which the photographer is both the director and the actor at the same time. And because of whether the children are interested in the performance, their behavior during the shooting depends. The moment a child hears a question, he willy-nilly shifts his attention from wanting to be beautiful and controlling facial muscles to thinking about an unexpected question. His physiognomy at this time acquires a natural expression. This is the moment of truth, catch it, press the trigger. After a moment, the child will think about the question and respond: he will begin to speak, smile and begin to play “handsome” again.
If you failed to catch this wonderful moment, it does not matter - try again. You should not shoot talking children, squeeze smiles out of them if they themselves do not smile at you with full confidence. Uneven teeth or all sorts of glands in the mouth are very ugly. It's better for these guys not to open their mouths at all. Pictures of calm, smart kids are well bought up by parents. Any extremes in the manifestation of emotions are fraught with an increased percentage of the return of images.
Children should not be allowed to stand directly behind you. They begin to make faces, show horns, in a word, entertain the one who is already filming. This knocks down the rhythm of shooting, interferes with the creation of the optimal mood of the whole class. Confidence, benevolence, calmness, mild tolerance for children's pranks and at the same time firmness in organizational requirements are absolutely necessary. If you can get the teacher to tidy up her tomboys, and you don't waste time combing recalcitrant tufts and arranging collars and ties, you will be able to rent an entire class in forty-five minutes and still not "produce" marriage.
Senior classes are more difficult to shoot. The girls are all fashion models. They may sit in a chair with their back to the light because that side of their face seems better to them. Asking to move is useless. It is necessary to prepare in advance for rearranging the light from left to right and mark with an indelible felt-tip pen on the floor the place where the stand with an umbrella will be installed. Large guys will have to shoot while standing. Conversations with them and distractions should be more sophisticated and humorous. Commands in an orderly tone do not pass. In a confrontational environment, filming goes badly. For many guys, teenage pimples are potential "returners". They are removed, but do not redeem their portraits. Therefore, stock up on good covering powder and masking pencils. Under the friendly laughter of the guys, they will have to paint their cheeks and foreheads at a fast pace, not listening to objections.
The result is quite decent portraits without pimples and freckles. The alternative is computer retouching.
A special case is the shooting of teachers. They are sometimes not young, but they want to look their best. Prepare a soft filter or black stocking. Do not shoot teachers' faces close. The scale of their heads is better to reduce in comparison with the childish ones. Move the umbrella a little closer to the machine. The light will become flatter, but there will also be less shadows on the faces. Wrinkles and other skin imperfections will be less visible. How much the teacher likes his own portrait depends on how the pictures will be sold.
You should not go to classes yourself and collect money for photographs. It is better to agree with a specific person at school and hand over the entire shooting to him straightaway. Twenty percent of the money raised will go to pay for the consent of the director to work with you. Another expense item free photos for educators, teachers and their children or grandchildren. Sometimes these children attend the same school, sometimes toddlers are brought from home. It breaks the rhythm of shooting. Therefore, it is better to shoot such clients after lessons or in a pause between the first and second shifts.
The most surprising thing is that the experience of working in a school smoothly, without much effort, adapts to the shooting of armchair portraits of large leaders. It turned out that technically it is exactly the same job. The equipment does not need to be changed. You just need to take into account the physiological characteristics of people. If the client is very bald, you should not shine a light on his head, you can use the ceiling as a huge softbox. A tripod with an umbrella often has to be placed directly on the client's workbench. Although time is limited - big people have big worries, but you can still play with the light. Psychologically, it is much easier to work with adults - they themselves are interested in the result of shooting and, unlike children, they know how to control their emotions.
Cherish your customers. Try to meet them halfway, and then they will not cheat on you with other photographers.

Farewell film, farewell!
Four years ago, right after the very first shooting with a five-megapixel digital camera, I said these words. But a few more times through don't want to take on reportage shooting trouble-free Nikon F-5. I didn't have a perfect replacement for it. Now she is. Portraits of a schoolboy for an article about shooting a change house were taken by Nikon D2X, a portrait of Viktor Vekselberg - Nikon F-5 on a Fujichrome Astia 100 ACA slide. This is a very good fine-grain professional film. Both in the first and in the second case, the camera was equipped with a Nikkor 80-200 / 2.8 zoom, aperture 8. In the process of preparing the files for printing, I looked at both pictures at 200 percent magnification. And again he said to himself: - Farewell, film! - and added - goodbye forever!

P.S. A few words about the profitability of change houses:
The cost of the camera and mini-studio is approximately $2,500. A good everyday photographer in Moscow earns more than a thousand dollars a month. At the same time, the profitability of his work is approximately fifty percent, that is, of the collected money, he keeps about half for himself. Today, schools demand shooting only graduating classes and the third (it is also like graduation). Parental love for children sharply decreases after the child reaches school age.