2 Year Old Portrait/Christmas Portrait

[Lacey Anne]

My daughter turns two on the 21st. We did a really quick mini-shoot yesterday. Would love some C&C!

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[seaain.gray]

She is very cute, so nice subject... the pose is very natural, though as a father I am cringing a little in the hopes that that is not an old-fashioned glass ball with that little fragile stem!

Frankly, the ball in the mouth does detract a little in that it does set that tension up, and takes away from where the thoughts should be. Indeed, it simply hides a part of her face that is the most important to many... her beautiful smile.

Otherwise the pose is fine... and for myself, the framing is fine. I prefer natural light, so the light is fine. Clothing good especially for purpose. Exposure good, though highlights are blown here and there. The +.3 EV exposure compensation bit you a little in this case. It is easy to do that though in natural light, especially where there is variable cloud cover.

The image overall is soft. This is not necessarily a bad thing in portraiture, though I have found that it works best where there are a lot of imperfections ... generally kids have few of those kinds of imperfections and sharp portraits work well.

I cannot quite make out the point of focus. I'd like to think that it was her right eye, but if that is the case, your DOF was too shallow...

In looking at the EXIF data on this it looks like you were at 145mm 1/125th at 200 ISO f/5.3. Seems good enough to have gotten enough DOF for the facial features, and also seems to rule out an unsteady hand... you are close to the right numbers to rule that out.

So she was moving? My rule of thumb with kids is shoot lots and lots of pictures. Bracket, bracket, bracket. I know, hard to do. Generally speaking though I get one really, really fine picture in twenty when the kids are moving around and not restrained in some fashion. You can improve your chances by not leaving it up to the camera to choose the point of focus. Set it to dead center, focus directly on your desired focal point and recompose as required.

I think you could improve this particular photo greatly either with some selective sharpening or indeed with overall sharpening that does not go too far.

Please take this all in the spirit given which is: You have a beautiful daughter, and it would not take much for you to take this kind of photo to the next level. Overall a very nice photo of your daughter, and I hope this helps.

Kind regards,

Seaain

[Lacey Anne]

Seaain, that is the best critique I have ever read on any site. You rock. Thanks so much for the C&C!