Three tips for how to take your holiday photos (and actually be in them)

I love documenting my family, but I also want to be a part of my family’s celebrations. And sometimes that can be really difficult if you’re constantly behind the camera and never actually participating in things. So I want to tell you all about how to take your holiday photos AND be in them! 

I’ve too often been glued to my camera at a family event or celebration and look back and realize I hardly talked to anyone or spent time with them. I just took pictures for 5 hours. No one asked me to, I just wouldn’t put my camera down.

Tip number one: Little known fact – you don’t have to photograph EVERYTHING to really tell the story of the day. You deserve to be present and enjoy the time with your family and friends as well. 

Choose which parts of the day or events you know you want photos of, and take pictures for maybe 10 or 15 minutes. 

You can always keep your camera close if you think you’ll want to grab it really fast to capture some candid moments of your celebration. 

Tip number two: Pass the camera off to your spouse or trusted family member (settings already set helps a ton), give them a quick run down and GET IN THE PHOTOS. You are at the event also – you should get to be in the photos. 

This is also something that happens a lot – I take 100 photos and I am not in any of them from an entire holiday celebration so it’s like I wasn’t even there. Again, all my own doing. Click like if you can relate to this conundrum as well. 

Tip number three: If you don’t want to pass the camera off, invest in a tripod. Most DSLR cameras have an intermittent timer feature. You can set the camera up to take one photo every 60 seconds for one hour and then you’ll have 60 photos. You can set the interval for faster (like every 5, 10, 15 or 30 seconds – whatever you want) or slower (like every five minutes). And, you can change the duration. Maybe you only want 30 minutes or you want your camera to try for 2 hours. Make sure you have plenty of room on your memory card and a fully charged battery. 🙂 

Or if your DSLR will record in 4k you can pull stills from the video. This way will eat up the battery pretty quickly, and many cameras have set limits on how long they will record so be sure to know your camera’s parameters so you don’t miss anything important. 

I think the best tips are to strive for a combination of one and two – to just take a few photos, make sure to get in them, and then just be present in the moment with your people. You can subscribe by clicking here to see new videos every Monday. As always, see you next week!

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I am so excited you found me! Just so you to know your email is going to make my day, and I’ll probably do a little happy dance when it hits my inbox. I love email because it helps me keep all our important conversations in one place versus spreading the conversation out over email, text, Instagram DMs, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, etc. You can expect to hear from me within 24 hours. You can contact me here, or just shoot me an email at kelsey@kelseyalumbaugh.com

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