Friday gadget blogging: how we shoot (and publish) all those baby pictures

(written on Friday but published Saturday because Chiara needed attention before I could press Post)

We've gotten some positive comments on our Chiara photos, and while all the credit for their appeal goes, of course, to our extremely adorable subject, we made some lucky technological choices that have really helped us get (and post) the pictures we're getting.

Eye-Fi wireless camera card
Highly recommended for new parents. You might never see any of our pictures if we didn't have the Eye-Fi card. This is a camera memory card that, for the most part, functions like any other memory card you might put in your camera. But when it's in range of your wireless Internet connection, it will automatically connect, and upload your pictures, both to your home computer and to your selection of online photo-sharing services. It's completely hands-off: within a few minutes after we shoot a picture, it's uploaded, with no extra steps on our part. I can't emphasize enough how much this kind of time-saving helps when you're a new parent. If we had to take the camera down to the computer, connect the cable, run the photo-transfer program, and then upload the pictures, all by hand, I'm sure we wouldn't get around to it very often.

If you're thinking, "gee, sounds great, but I'm not sure I want every picture I take to appear on the Web, instantly and uncensored," there are ways around that. Most photo-sharing sites can be set up so they don't automatically publish your pictures the instant they receive them, but instead wait for your go-ahead. This is how we have SmugMug set up: the day's gallery fills up as we take pictures, but it doesn't get published for public viewing until one of us has gone to the site, reviewed the pictures, and published the gallery (something that takes almost no time when one of us is near a computer, so it's easy to do daily).

Nikon SB-400 bounce flash
This is the key to the nice color quality and even illumination of our Chiara pictures. You just can't take indoor pictures of a child, with the quality we want, without some kind of additional light: they will be visibly dark and unevenly lit, and often they will be completely ruined by motion blur -yours or your child's. You need flash. Every camera has a little built-in flash, but since these fire straight at the subject, they give the scene a very unnatural quality: the subject in the center of the frame is blasted with illumination, while everything around and behind is dark and wrong-looking. What you need is a flash that lights up the whole room, not just the subject, and this is what bounce flash does: it fires up, or sideways, bouncing light off the ceiling and walls so that the scene looks natural.

The SB-400 is the small, very lightweight, relatively inexpensive, bounce flash that mates with our current digital SLR, the Nikon D40. The SB-400 is half the size and half the price of anything comparable that Canon makes, and it works brilliantly well. The SB-400 is so good that, to me, it is a strong argument for getting the Nikon system over the Canon, even though I'm a two-decade Canon EOS user, and very fond of the Canons.

Digital SLR and long zoom lens
As I said above, we're shooting with a Nikon D40 SLR. It has no more megapixels than your typical subcompact camera these days. It may very well have fewer. But each pixel on its sensor is bigger than the ones in smaller cameras, and that makes a big difference. The smaller the pixel on the sensor, the less light it captures, and the more its signal has to be amplified by the camera's electronics - which amplifies noise as well. In other words, the smaller the sensor, the lower its signal to noise ratio. This shows up in photos as unevenness of color - a sort of grainy or even sparkly effect - in areas of the picture that should be smoothly colored. The pictures of Chiara that we've shot with our compact cameras - like a Canon S3 IS that has 6MP just like the D40 - don't look nearly as good, because the skin is just not as smooth and realistic as with the bigger camera. For good baby close-ups, you want the bigger camera.

And we're shooting with a relatively long zoom lens. This lets us fill the frame with Chiara's head - or even her hand - from a few feet away instead of having to crowd right in on her. Besides being a general convenience, that's helpful because it keeps the child from being startled by the sound of the camera firing at close quarters. The lens we use is the Nikon 18-200mm VR lens; in 35mm terms this is roughly equivalent to a 28-300mm zoom. The VR means Vibration Reduction, and is Nikon's term for what Canon calls IS or Image Stabilizing: tiny sensors measure, and try to correct for, camera movement during the moments that your shutter is open. The outcome is less blurry pictures. This stuff really works, and we are crazy about it. Get VR or IS lenses whenever possible; we do.

That's it for the baby-photo-technology post. Use bounce flash, use an SLR and a long lens (with VR/IS if possible), and make uploading from the camera to your computer/website as automatic and painless as you can. And have a great subject - fortunately every baby is one.