My first family photo shoot

[lalalala<3life]

This is the Catricola family. Their little girls are 1 year and 3 weeks the baby is the same baby that I took the newborn photos of. The 1 year old was really hard to photograph cause she was moving all the time so some of her got motion blur. C&C please! Hope you all like them.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

 

[Jankster]

were you using a tripod for these? most seem a little soft...the composition in 3 bugs me a little. the open space to the right of the wife should be cropped to make it seem more equal. 5 could be cropped a little tighter imo as well. but keep it up!!

 

[Inst!nct]

i feel like you just didnt have enough light..

 

[lalalala<3life]

yeah I agree with the crop sugestions. And with the lighting too. I dont do good with indoore light. I should probably stick with natural light, but it was raining that day and I was forced to do it inside =(

 

[PhotoVerve]

I agree with them being soft overall. What were you using for a lighting set-up (if any)? Also, what were your settings for these shots?

 

[Nikkor]

Too soft, as said before. Also, you can see the crease and folds in the backdrop, an easy fix in Photoshop.

Definetely more light.

 

[Nikkor]

Also, picture #5 doesn't seem to fit. As its obviously not the mother in the other shots.

 

[SrBiscuit]

WB?

 

[NateWagner]

Agreed, the white balance seems quite off. And the images in particular seem to be rather soft.

Also, it might be nice if they weren't sitting on the floor for all of them. I don't know how tall the background sheet thing was, but if they could be on a chair or standing up that might be nice.

 

[NateWagner]

Your images are listed as not ok to edit, but if you would like I would be happy to do a quick edit to show a somewhat fixed version of one of these.

 

[iolair]

They all look a bit yellow/orange to me... I'm guessing you shot under regular indoor lighting. Learn how to set your white balance using grey card (or even white paper) before you begin a set - and/or shoot in RAW and correct afterwards.

You took these at 1/20 or 1/15 s... that's too slow for children. Use (off-camera - modified or bounced) flash if you have it. If not, get some stronger lights in there and/or bump up your ISO to 1600. Any extra noise is relatively easy to deal with. You could also have opened up the aperture a little from 4.5 - what's the limit on the lens you were using? A wider aperture would have got more light in helping you to take faster shots, as well as helping a little to blur out imperfections in the background.

You shot these in the "Action" program mode on your camera. Are you comfortable with the A, S and M modes?

You have the guy facing you square on quite a bit, I think a 45 degree angle would be a better pose for him. I like the pose/composition on 6 though. You did a good job in getting them to wear plain, coordinated clothes.