children

Anyone who has ever tried to take pictures of children knows how challenging it can be. They don’t have attention spans, they don’t listen, and they switch from happy to grumpy within seconds for seemingly no reason at all.

What if some of the most famous faces in the music industry were decades younger? For his latest project, fashion photographer Viktorija Pashuta shot portraits of 11 children looking like 11 music icons.

We're not sure if the new Nikon W100 is waterproof and shockproof because it's a standard "tough" camera, or because its target audience is fun-loving 8-year-olds. Whatever the case, Nikon's newest "rugged" cam was definitely designed with the whole family in mind.

Phoxi Friends is a line of cute photography tools designed for those who shoot portraits of kids. Each eye-catching creature features a long tail and the ability to wrap, extend, and squeak.

The children are always the most vulnerable but at the same time, the most resilient. Their young age makes them easy prey for sickness, abduction and trafficking and they often do not even understand why they have to leave their home. Nonetheless, these little human beings show impressive courage as they always are the first ones to regain their smiles.

Sex offenders have the 1st Amendment right to photograph children in public. That's what a state Court of Appeals in Wisconsin ruled on Tuesday, striking down a law that make it illegal for registered sex offenders to take ordinary pictures of kids in public without getting permission from the parents.

Photographer Jonathan Diaz is using his imagination and portrait photography skills for a good cause. He's the founder of Anything Can Be, a Salt Lake City, Utah-based non-profit that's working to inspire hope in young cancer patients by bringing their dreams to life with photos.

Artist Yolanda Dominguez believes that there is something wrong with the way women are portrayed in fashion photographs. For her recent project titled Ninos vs Moda ("Children vs Fashion"), she asked a group of 8-year-old children to look at an assortment of fashion shots and to describe what they see in them. The reactions can be seen in the 4.5-minute video above.

Editor's note: Elena Shumilova is a mother and photographer based in Russia who became a viral sensation online after sharing her remarkable photos of her children. Just two years after first picking up a camera, her photos were viewed over 60 million times by people around the world. In this article, Shumilova shares how she captures her beautiful and nostalgic pictures.

The Syrian civil war has been raging for over four years now, and millions of Syrians have fled their homes and into neighboring countries as refugees. As refugees struggle with basic necessities and figuring out their futures, a new project has popped up to give refugee children a creative outlet and a voice through photography. Hundreds of children have been documenting their tumultuous childhood experience using disposable cameras.

As photo sharing becomes one of the fastest growing niches in social media, a new British advertising campaign is warning kids and their parents about the dangers of sharing too much through online photo services.

Family portraits are usually meant to be idealized representation of families, with nice clothes, pleasant smiles, and beautiful backdrops. The portraits in "Best Case Scenario" are different. In each of the images in the project, lifestyle photographer Danielle Guenther attempts to capture the reality of being a parent of young children. Things aren't perfect and peaceful -- life is often chaos.

There are few things that symbolize the innocence of childhood the way a teddy bear does. A stuffed companion who is as real to a 2-year-old as anything made of flesh and blood, at that age the teddy bear isn't just something you play with... it plays back.

It's this innocence and wonder that photographer Adrian Murray captures in his touching photographs of his two boys, Emerson and Grayson, and their toy bear.

Photographer Zeb Andrews prefers to slow the world down when he captures a photograph. The Portland-based photographer first began shooting with a pinhole camera purely for fun, but little did he know that, within a matter of a few years his work would take him to Turkey where he would share his love of pinhole photography with Syrian child refugees.

Lisa Holloway might be a super-human. Until we get her near some kryptonite, we can't be sure, but the self-taught photographer somehow manages to take care of 10 children while simultaneously running a successful photography business.

All the while, she's stacking her portfolio full of gorgeous natural light portraits of newborns, babies, children, seniors and families.

It’s not uncommon for photographers to want to use their chosen profession as a vehicle to do good. There are a number of photography based charities out there and all in all, they’re in it for the right reasons.

Speaking of the right reasons, if you’re a parent, you will really appreciate Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep (NILMDTS). It’s an organization that provides the free gift of professional portraiture to parents who are dealing with the loss of a baby.

Summertime is quickly turning into Autumn. Before we know it, the sunshine and green tones that surround us will transform into fiery hues, with plenty of rain and wind to follow. But that hasn’t stopped Polish photographer Izabela Urbaniak from attempting to eternalize the carefree nature of summer in a beautiful black-and-white photo series titled Summertime.

Kuddle isn't your typical photo sharing app. Designed for children, this "Instagram for kids" doesn't just offer a safe environment where the youngins can share photos and become future cappuccino photographers, it actually teaches them about proper online behavior, or 'netiquette', at the same time.

Too often, photographs of life in a rural village in a distant country revolve around sadness, hunger and depravity, but rural village life can also be playful, full of joy, and beautiful in its simplicity. It's the latter of the two that Indonesian photographer Herman Damarher set out to capture.

Photographer Alix Martinez has been shooting a very creative ongoing series of underwater portraits with the help of some brave and equally creative children. Blurring the line between fine art and conceptual, the images show children performing daily activities in the unknown abyss... alright, alright... it's just a pool... but I prefer unknown abyss.

From Los Angeles based photographer Jamie Johnson comes a unique series of photographs that juxtapose the past and the present in a fascinating way: large format wet plate collodion photos of children writing cheeky modern-day bad deeds on a turn-of-the-century chalkboard.

"Just because it isn't happening here, doesn't mean it isn't happening." That's the tagline of one of the most powerful, shocking ad campaign we have ever run across.

Put together by Save the Children UK, this campaign uses the popular 'second per day video' lifelogging concept to drive home an anti-war message in the most stark and unsettling way, focusing on how war affects children.

Everybody takes photos of their family, trying their best to keep a chronicle of their children as they grow up. They capture moments both mundane and momentous and store them away in what later becomes the family album (although it seems that might soon be a thing of the past).

But while everybody might make an effort to capture these memories, photographer Alain Laboile does so with an expertise behind the lens that has turned his own personal family album, a series called La Famille, into a heartwarming viral sensation.

Russian photographer Elena Shumilova only got into photography in early 2012, when she acquired her first camera. But if you were to look through her Flickr and 500px profiles, you would swear she had been doing it for much, much longer.

Designer Yoni Lefevre has teamed up with photographer Nick Bookelaar on a creative project that we just fell in love with the moment we set eyes on it. It's called Grey Power, and in it Lefevre and Bookelaar turn children's refrigerator-worthy drawings of their grandparents into real life photographs.

A couple of days ago we ran across this strange article online. Very short on details, what we know is that a man was seen taking photos of children in a suburb of Toronto a few days ago, and is now being sought after by police.

Last Thursday, we told you about the newest anti-paparazzi bill to hit the California State Assembly. Focused on expanding the definition of harassment, SB 606 was drafted for the specific purpose of protecting the children of celebrities -- some hollywood actresses have already spoken out in support of the bill.

As with many a legal mater, however, not everyone is in favor of the bill. While most would agree that protecting children from being harassed by paparazzi is a worthy goal, the NPPA is now officially speaking out against SB 606, warning the public that this bill's vague wording "threatens first amendment rights."

Most years around this time we take a road trip to visit my family in New Jersey. There are always a couple of camera bags in the back seat, as there will be tomorrow night when we saddle up and head south once again. And most years around this time I think back to something that happened on another hot summer night less than two months before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

For photographers, a lot has changed since then, but we have to remember that most of it started changing well before 9/11. When my students complain about the hassles of trying to make photographs in public places, I tell them that it’s something they’re just going to have to get used to. And then sometimes I tell them this story.

Sara Hansson and Jens Lennartsson feel that the media at large has painted an unfair and inaccurate picture of children in developing countries. And so, they've founded an organization that seeks to undo this wrong in a unique way.

The organization is called EYE AM, and through it, Hansson and Lennartsson hope to reach out to the children in these countries, teach them the basics of photography, and then help them to tell their own stories.

I am a former kid. I have lived through the trauma of bad photos taken of me by my father. I was not photogenic, and admittedly he had a cheap camera. He had a knack for catching the incredibly awkward moments of childhood in a way that now makes me cringe. If I could go back in time and give my 1970′s dad a few tips on how to take better pictures of me I would.

As a former kid recovering from the trauma of bad photographs, I feel like it is my duty to future kids of the world to give parents and photographers some tips I have learned on how to take some great photos of kids. Or, at the very least, photos that won’t make your kid cringe when they get older.

The video above is a commercial Canon is running over in Japan to promote its new Kiss X7/Rebel SL1, the world's smallest and lightest DSLR. It shows how the camera is perfect for soccer moms who would like to capture action shots of their "super soccer kids."

This portrait is of a little boy named Lucas who lives in Sydney, Australia. Like many children around the world, Lucas enjoys playing with toys, particularly his set of miniature trains and wooden railroad tracks.

Like many photographers around the world, Gabriele Galimberti enjoys traveling. During an 18 month span of travels, Galimberti visited and photographed children in a long list of countries around the world with each child posing with his or her favorite toys. Lucas was one of the kids Galimberti visited for his project, which is titled "Toy Stories."

Photoshop wizard Cristian Girotto's photo series L'Enfant Extérieur (the outer child) takes his subjects' inner children and brings them, quite literally, to the surface. In the series, Girotto explores what adults would look like if men and women never left the cuteness of infancy -- at least in some respects. Each photo, originally captured by photographer Quentin Curtat, shows the subject 'shopped to look like a toddler.

For his project titled Reflexion Autour du Bassin, French photographer Alain Laboile created fantasy photographs of his children, seen through the reflection of a small pond.

Getting a good picture of a toddler, dog or other easily-distracted subject is no easy task. You snap, you whistle, you make funny faces, but in the end you're often left with nothing more than a blurry picture and a very real relief that nobody else was there to see what just happened.

We've featured a number of solutions for overcoming this (e.g. cameras with front-facing LCDs, friendly lens-mounted toys), but a smartphone mount is one of the more versatile ones. After all, you can use it for other purposes when you're not photographing kids. The Look Lock, shown above, is one such mount on the market.

Soccer, known as football around the world, is played by hundreds of millions of people in hundreds of countries, making it the world's most popular sport. However, a large percentage of its enthusiasts are unable to afford actual soccer balls to play with. Instead, they fashion their own makeshift balls out of things they have on hand -- things like socks, rubber bands, plastic bags, strips of cloth, and string. The DIY balls may be difficult to use and ugly in appearance, but each one is a treasured possession of its owner.

Belgian photographer Jessica Hilltout decided to turn her attention and her camera lens on these one-of-a-kind creations, documenting "football in its purest form" in Africa. The project is titled AMEN.

British advertising photographer Tim MacPherson has a wonderful series of photographs showing children having fun in imaginary worlds created out of ordinary objects. Kids are seen couch surfing, skiing down stairs, and horseback riding on shelves. The project is titled, "Kids at Home and Play."

Digital and mobile phone photography have made it easy for parents to document every waking (and non-waking) moment of a child's life, but what effect is this constant picture-taking having on kids? David Zweig has written up an article over at the New York Times arguing that our culture of photography is intruding on the preciousness of youth, and that parents should take fewer photographs of their children.

If you suffer from gear envy, you might want to skip over this post. Apparently children from wealthy Chinese families these days are traveling with fancy DSLR cameras while on vacation. A person named Liu Li Yang recently published a series of photos over on Chinese social networking service Renren that show a group of tourist children clutching expensive Canon and Nikon DSLRs and lenses.