Overcast is the easiest light you will ever get. The cloud turns the whole sky into one enormous soft light source. It comes from everywhere at once, so there are no hard shadows, no blown highlights, no squinting, and it looks the same at eleven in the morning as it does at three in the afternoon. You can point your camera in any direction and the light will be fine. Bright sun is so much harder. There are of course some tradeoffs. The light can be a bit flat flat, so photos can feel a bit low in contrast, which you fix in about five seconds of editing. And a white sky is boring, so keep it out of frame if you need to. Use trees or buildings as your background, or fill the frame with the person. A grey Tuesday is not a reason to leave the camera inside. It is one of the best days of the month to take it out. What is the weather doing where you are right now, and were you planning to shoot today?

Golden hour is beautiful. It is also, for a parent, mostly theoretical. Where I live, in December, the light is doing its golden thing at around two in the afternoon, while the kids are at school. In June the sun is still going at eleven at night, so golden hour arrives about four hours after bedtime. Between those two extremes it lands during the school run, dinner, or homework. Wherever you live, some version of this is true. The best light of the day arrives at a time your family is busy. If golden hour is the only light you consider worth shooting, you will take almost no photographs of your children. The light that is actually available to you is window light. It is there every single day, it does not care about the season, and it is soft enough to be forgiving. Morning at the breakfast table. Mid afternoon on the living room floor. The bathroom window during bath time. Learn to see the light in your own house at the times your family is actually in it, and you will shoot fifty times more than the person waiting for the perfect evening. Use golden hour when it turns up. Do not organise your life around it.

This is the oldest piece of photography advice there is, and it is the reason your kids are squinting in every summer photo you own. With the sun behind you, all of it lands flat on their face. They screw their eyes up because you have asked them to look directly into it. Shadows fall hard under the eyes and nose. Colours go harsh. Everyone looks like they are being interrogated. Turn around and try putting the light behind them instead. Their hair lights up at the edges. Their face falls into soft, even light with nothing to squint at. The background goes bright and hazy and the whole frame softens. Two things to know before you try it. Your camera will underexpose the face, because all that brightness behind them fools the meter, so push exposure compensation to plus one or plus two and let the background blow out. Nobody looks at the background. And if the sun hits your lens directly the image goes milky, so move a step so their head covers the sun, or shade the lens with your hand. Try it once this week, late afternoon, and look at the back of the camera.

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.