Try this. Open the folder of photos you love most of your kids from the last five years. Count how many of them involve a child looking into the lens saying cheese. It will be almost none. The smile you get on request is not their smile. It is a face children learn to make for adults with cameras, and by six most of them have perfected it. It tells you nothing about who they were. Ten years from now it will be the photo that means the least to you, because it is a photo of a performance rather than a person. What you will want is the other stuff. The concentration face while building something. The specific way she holds her sister's hand. The walk. The bottom lip when things are not going her way. Those are the things that disappear so gradually you never notice them going. There is a fair version of the counter argument. Take the posed one occasionally. Grandparents want it, and one clear photo a year of a child looking at you is worth having. Just do not let it be the only kind you take, and never make it the price of admission before you are allowed to shoot. Stop announcing that you are taking a photo.

This one is true, which is what makes it a tricky one. It was said about phones, and as a point about photography it is correct. A photograph taken on a phone exists. A photograph you did not take does not. No argument. But listen to how it gets used. It is the sentence people reach for when the real camera has been in the cupboard for four months and they want to feel fine about that. It turns a habit problem into a philosophy. You bought the camera for a reason. It sees in a dark living room in a way your phone cannot. It separates your daughter from the mess behind her. It gives you files you can still print at A3 in twenty years. Those are not small differences and no software fixes them. So take the advice literally instead of using it as an excuse. Make the real camera the one you have with you. Leave it out on a shelf, not in the bag. One lens on it, ready. Charged, with a card in it. On the way to the park, in the car for the day out, on the table at breakfast. A camera in a cupboard is not a camera. It is furniture. So if you own it, make sure you are physically able to use it. Take it with you.

Composition rules are not wrong. They are just the wrong thing to work on first, and they cause a specific problem in beginners. They make you stand too far back. When you are thinking about fitting the whole child in, keeping the feet in frame, and placing them on a third, you unconsciously back up. Now there is a metre of carpet under them, a radiator behind them, a laundry pile to the left, and your daughter is a small figure in a photo of a room. Two changes will do more for your photos this month than every composition rule combined. Get closer. Closer than feels polite. Fill the frame with the person, not the furniture. Cut off the top of a head if that is what it takes to be close enough to see the expression. Get lower. Not slightly lower, all the way down. Sit on the floor, lie on it, put the camera on the ground and use the flip screen. Photographing a child from adult height makes them look small and the photo look like surveillance. From their height it looks like their world. Learn the rules later😊

Primes are excellent. Sharper for the money, better in low light, lighter, and they teach you to move your feet instead of just twisting your hand. I shoot two of them at home. But the reason this advice gets repeated is snobbery, and snobbery costs parents photographs. Here is the real comparison. A zoom that stays on your camera beats a prime that stays in the bag. The best lens is not the sharpest one, it is the one that was mounted when something happened. Honest tradeoffs, both ways. A kit zoom that opens to f/3.5 at the wide end and f/5.6 at the long end will struggle indoors in winter and your ISO will climb. But it will also let you go from a whole room to one face without walking backwards into a table, and for a parent with two kids in different corners of the house, that flexibility is worth something. If you own a zoom and you are wondering whether to replace it, do this first. Leave it at one focal length for a week. Use it like a prime. You will learn which one you actually want, and you will spend the money once instead of twice. Nobody has ever looked at a photo of their child and asked what lens it was taken on. Or at least that was absolutely not the most important thing about the photo. The most important thing is that it exists. Zoom or prime on your camera right now, and is it there by choice?