Before Bean was born, I had several years of practice photographing my nieces and nephew. And I never understood why my photos were always an absolute blurry mess.

It was during a trip home to Philadelphia that I realized the key was to wait until one of my nieces ran into the sunlight streaming into my mother’s living room, and then jump on my camera and take a dozen photos. See, because it is ALL about shutter speed. That is really the only trick.

Shutter speed is how quickly the shutter opens and closes as you take a photo. In bright light, you need a quick shutter speed or else your photo can get blown out (everything is white). In shade or dark light, you need a slow shutter speed so that your camera can absorb all the light it can before it finishes taking the photo. However, using a slow shutter speed also means that anything moving (flailing arms, bobbing heads) while the shutter is open renders as a blur in the final photo.

Children spend a lot of time in the shade, either indoors or out, so you are usually trying to take a photo of them in somewhat darkness. Then, they have a proclivity to move quickly or flutter and race around, or do pirouettes and jetes. In order to get a good photo of them, you need a quick shutter speed to match their movement. Unfortunately, given that they’re likely in a darkened setting, your shutter speed also needs to be slow in order to absorb all the ambient light. So, it’s a Catch-22.

Here are a few ways to deal with the shutter speed issue:

1) Plop the baby or child near a bright window. Even better if you can position them in the sunlight streaming in. Take your photos quickly before they run away. I like to give Bean a prop or toy of some kind to distract her from running away immediately.

2) Related, do photo shoots outside.

3) Use continual shooting. Your camera may have an option to either take one photo when you press the shutter button, or continual shooting if you hold the button down. Opt for continual shooting if you’re taking photos of kids. Then, point your camera at them and let loose. If you take 5 or 6 photos of them in a row, there might be one photo that’s not blurry.

4) If it’s night time, either sit back and enjoy the moment…or turn on every light you can. Of course, if the darkness is a feature of the photo (see photo below), then go with a faster shutter speed on purpose so that the photo realistically captures that it was dark.

5) If you know how to use manual settings on your camera, boost your ISO setting. As you increase ISO, your need for fast shutter speeds goes down. If I’m shooting indoors, I go up to an ISO 400 as my standard. If I’m photographing a moving kid or wildlife, that goes up to 1250 or higher.

The catch is that you lose clarity as you increase ISO. So, baby girl’s arms may not be a blur, but the entire image might be grainy.

6) Open your aperture. Camera settings revolve around the trade-off between shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Another way to get a faster shutter speed indoors is to increase your aperture. In a bit of irony, increasing your aperture means decreasing the number that you see on your camera. So, reducing that number to around 1.5 or 2.4, or as low as your camera lens can go, will give you faster shutter speeds.

The catch here (if you’ve noticed, there is always a catch) is that as your increase aperture, your photo depth decreases. Only your kid will be in focus. A photo shot with a 2.4 aperture reading will have a clear photo of the child, but completely blurred background. Fine if you just want a photo of your kid, but not great if you wanted a photo of your kid with a proud grandma looking on in the background. If you really need to have grandma in focus too, look back up to point #3 and play with ISO settings instead. (Yes, you are choosing between a grainy photo or a photo with grandma AND baby in it. That’s indoor photography for you.)

7) Determine what your minimum shutter speed is. For me, indoors and photographing a child, I’ve determined that it’s 1/40th of a second (this will just look like 40 on most cameras.) If I go slower than that, the kid is a blur. So, as I play with ISO and aperture, I know that I can’t go below 1/40th of a second. Your speed may be different though, so play around with it and figure out what your threshold is.

8) Accept the blur. Photography captures only still moments, but a blurred limb is a way to document how the child was moving when you shot the photo. I have tons of photos of Bean playing with her first rattle, her entire body still except for the blur of the rattle. I have this one photo of my niece, who is in perpetual motion in real life as she is in my photos, that is all blurred arms, legs, and hair except her angelic, smiling face is in complete focus. She had been skipping across the room and must have paused for a split second to look at me. It captures HER, and really, isn’t that the point of photography.

Here is a photo I took in a very dark December room.

This photo used an ISO of 1600, aperture f/2.8, and shutter speed of 1/30th of a second. As you can see, this photo is grainier than the lede photo, which had an ISO of 200. A f/2.8 aperture is very low, and explains why the ornament and her hands are in focus, but nothing else is. I increased the ISO and aperture in order to get a somewhat fast 1/30th of a second shutter speed. And, despite all my manual settings, the photo is still fairly dark.

I think it’s a sweet little photo — we were decorating our first Christmas tree and Bean inspected all of the ornaments before handing them off. It’s grainy (high ISO) and doesn’t show her face (high aperture) and was clearly shot at night, but I think it does a good job of documenting a moment in time.

(Apologies for not including tons of photos to help explicate these rules. I make it a point of not posting any identifiable photos of children, and that goes triply so for my nieces and nephew. I hope you understand!)