Since we’re called Shooting the Kids, you’ve probably guessed that there’s a lot of photography of children going on here. But just to reassure you all that we’re not pros and we don’t always get it right, I’d like to share with you some photos I took last weekend of my daughter and her two cousins.

It was my mom’s birthday, and she really wanted all her grandkids together in one cute photograph. The daughter wanted nothing to do with it. The grass? Scary! Boys? Scary! Camera in her face? Just plain annoying! This was the final shot. It’s almost OK in smaller format. But if you click on it for the larger size, you’ll see the true emotion on her face. Read on to see more from this photo shoot and to see what went wrong.

Things to do better next time:

1. First off, since my daughter was already clearly worked up, I should have just ditched the effort to get a good shot. Instead, we sat the kids down for some forced smiles. My nephews are good at those, as you can see from the picture to the left.

2. If I would have been paying attention, I would have set up the shot before. To do this, all you have to do is look around (through the viewfinder of your camera, if you’d like) to find a good setting for the picture. I would have definitely not had that tree growing right out of my baby’s head.

3. I would have put the kids in a place they were already comfortable, like right where they were playing inside before we took the picture. Instead we rounded them all up and made them sit in the wet grass in the backyard. Not terribly comfortable, hence the somewhat uncomfortable smiles.

4. I would have made the photo more personal. Instead of lining the kids in a row, I would have maybe had one standing or holding the baby in his lap. Or maybe I would have ditched the whole smiling-at-the-camera generic picture that’s all too familiar and just shot a bunch of photos of them interacting and playing. The boys are so cute around the baby that I know we could have gotten at least of couple good shots doing that.

Instead, we ended up with about 10-12 shots of shirt grabbing, forehead furrowing, brothers pushing and babies crying. In the end, I’m not too disappointed because the shots we got tell a hilarious story of a photo shoot gone all wrong. But Grandma definitely did not get her portrait of three angelic grandkids that day.

Do you have any tips to share on your own staged photos of kids?