When photographing babies or newborns, one of the most important skills you can learn is how to freeze or show motion in your photos. This feature is controlled by the shutter speed, which is why I highly recommend shutter priority for parents that may not be completely comfortable shooting in manual mode. To freeze motion in my family sessions, ideally I prefer to shoot at 1/125 or faster. This image above is shot at 1/125 at f/3.5 ISO 1000. It freezes all the motion in the photo, except for the baby’s hands which were banging on the piano keys. Now, I like having a little motion blur to help tell a story, but that is a creative preference. To completely freeze the scene, I would have to increase my shutter speed to 1/250. This speed is generally recommended for children when they are playing around.
In shutter priority, you can set the ISO and shutter speed and then the aperture setting will be on auto. But, what happens if you want to change the depth of field? Well, then your best choice would be manual mode. I’m not going to get into the specifics of manual model in this article, but there are tons of resources for learning manual mode online. My personal favorite is the Fundamentals of Photography class on Creativelive.com. It’s super in-depth and full of really helpful animated slides that are ideal for visual learners.