After A Hard Week of Saving the World...

Copacetic · Jul 28, 2008

Sometimes you just want to go play in the park of a Sunday.

I went to Callaway Gardens, a sort of local botanical gardens attraction, with my parents, grandmother, aunt, cousin and her three-year-old son. I was the 'designated photographer', and got this shot on the way back to the car from the slide. He really likes Superman, and insisted on wearing his Superman pajamas through our picnic lunch and until our jaunt to the vegetable garden.

He's an incredibly cute kid, and I've got a ton more shots of him from yesterday. The best ones are of him playing in the lake; I'll post one or two later, I haven't had time to post-process them yet. I just loved this shot, and had to post it and see what y'all thought of it.

This was shot at f/5.0, with a shutter speed of 1/2500 and an ISO of 800, with white balance and exposure tweaked in Camera Raw, as well as noise reduction, sharpening and a quick crop.

Critique welcome!

iflynething · Jul 28, 2008

That's a super great shot. Very cute that he's wearing that. I wish you didn't crop off his left foot though

~Michael~

tirediron · Jul 29, 2008

Great pose, agree with above post regarding tight crop and the foot. I'd like to see the exposure evened up a little more; as it is, it's dark enough that a lot of detail is lost.

kellylindseyphotography · Jul 29, 2008

you were in a tough lighting situation there. That bright dappled light versus the shade makes your meter go nuts, and here it made sure that the sun on the ground didn't blow out, thereby underexposing your subject by 2 perheps more stops.

In this kind of uneven lighting situation, you have to do 1 of 2 things. Expose for your subject, shoot in raw, and blow out that dappled light in the foreground. You might recover some of it in PP, and most importantly your subject will be exposed correctly.

Or you use flash to light your subject.

Overall, I love the feel of what you were trying to do and the cape and the composition is great too. What you should work on understanding light and how it affects your cameres meter etc.

Copacetic · Jul 29, 2008

Thanks everybody! As for the crop, that is how the shot was framed, unfortunately. I didn't truly know what I'd got until after I'd taken it; I was just snapping away, trying to find good compositions. I only cropped the top and left of the picture, to take out a car tire and legs.

Lighting... Firstly, thanks, Kelly! It was indeed extremely underexposed. I actually pulled it up quite a bit in Camera Raw, along with boosting shadow detail. This brought out the noise of ISO 800, though. After that shoot, I've quit using Auto ISO, it seems to have too great a tendency to up ISO far too much far too soon. Raw's noise reduction helped a lot, but it softens the image more than I would like, requiring more sharpening.

I haven't yet experimented with fill flash, thanks for mentioning that. I'm probably going to break down and pick up Understanding Exposure, because that is the area that I find most trying. Off to do more reading online until then!

Thanks,

Josh