3200, Newbie, new 50mm 1.8g Lens. Great light, Cute kid (mine), ALL my pics suck!

[Midnight78]

Scotts: Very very interesting pictures. It is a great way to illustrate (for me) how the affect of aperture on focus. Great reference. Thank you so much. Which one, from a photographer's perspective, is the best?

 

[Midnight78]

Brain: The teacher quickly covered the spot metering mode in our class on Thursday. I will make the change on my camera.

I really have no idea how to close or how far to be away from my subjects. My kids are 3 and 12 months and are not cooperative on any level as one is old enough to not want to help me out and the other is just too young to follow direction. Yes. The chair is totally distracting. I had her on the chair for a big and didn't move it.

As for flash, both my photography teacher and our professional family photographer do not use flash, ever. So, I'm thinking "no flash...no flash." I do have one of the attached flashes and can bounce. I was able to get some casual family pics over dinner with the flash bounced off the ceiling. No anything artistic, but decent enough for family shots.

How do you get both eyes in focus? Bump up the aperture???

Excellent points regarding capturing the memory not just the face. I do get a little hung up on closeups of my kids faces.

Cute kids!!

 

[Braineack]

I used a flash on all three :-D

 

[Gavjenks]

Here are pics. Unedited. The top two are at my home and the bottom two are at my kid's class. Would love any feedback.

1) Looks like your aperture was probably too wide, and/or you moved a bit after focusing. Wide apertures can look awesome and professional, but they also give you a razor thin zone of in-focus-ness ("depth of field"), so it's really easy to miss the focus slightly, or only have one eye in focus. In this case, what you could have done is:
* Moved a bit to the right and pivoted so that that chair is just off of the frame to the right, and whatever behind it is further away.
* Then closed your aperture another stop or so.
* Result #1: The background would still be just as blurry, because smaller aperture would cancel out backgroudn being further away.
* Result #2: The eyes would be much more likely to be in focus, due to smaller aperture AND being closer to the same distance from your lens (don't go so far to the right that you take a picture of her dead on center, though)

2) The tiltedness of the photo is distracting. But mainly, this required either putting the window to the side or behind you, OR using flash to brighten the girl compared to the sunlight. Your camera tries to get an average gray more or less in the image, so tons of white in the window has to be balanced by an inky dark face in it's opinion to = gray. But no matter what metering you use, you won't get a good shot like this. If you bump up the exposure to make the face well lit, then the windows will become blindingly ridiculous. So the only solutions are to avoid this in the first place, or use the flash which brightens the kid but not the windows significantly. Called "fill flash" (you don't want on camera flash if possible. A handheld speedlight with a small umbrella or something is better. But if that's too inconvenient, on camera flash is better than nothing. Ideally with SOME sort of diffuser that spreads out the light a bit (semi opaque white material usually that takes up more surface area than the head of the flash does by itself)

3) Again, fill flash or make the window not behind the kid. And also re-composing the scene so that there's not a creepy head peering over the kid's shoulder.

4) Again, fill flash or make the window not behind the kid. And also re-composing to get the distracting orange thing out of the scene.