Any progress?

[AMOMENT]

I know these are by no means close to perfect but I took these of my girls because, again, they are always available. =) Anyway, I tried to apply some of your suggestions. Any improvement? Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!!

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[AMOMENT]

I need to photoshop out the green sheet I needed to lay down because it was muddy. They uploaded a little grainy looking.

 

[AMOMENT]

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[AMOMENT]

I know the little one has a runny nose. I did my best to keep wiping, lol. I can photoshop that a little better hopefully. I know these are flawed but I'm mainly looking to see if I did any better with my exposure/composition/and focus.

 

[MLeeK]

I'd like to see you critique these as if you were one of us. What do you think we will tell you? Pick EVERY LITTLE ELEMENT APART. You'll learn more than you ever imagined... GO!

 

[e.rose]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like to me that you used on camera flash for all of them?

They're outdoor so you probably would have been better off using more ambient light and just a *touch* of fill flash, if you had no way to get it off camera.

The first one would have benefitted from a larger DOF because one of your kids is out of focus. On the other hand they *both* look out of focus to me, it's just that one is worse than the other. The one on the right looks as though she's out of focus (her features seem really soft to me), but you tried to save it by over sharpening her eyes.

#3 your kid's face doesn't seem as sharp as the bow on her head...

#4 is blurry...

#5 looks like an "outtake" with the way it looks like they're interacting.

You probably love these a lot because they're your kids, but objectively speaking, those are a few of my thoughts on these.

Keep shooting :sillysmi:

 

[AMOMENT]

I can totally critique them myself! I think I know what is wrong with them but not exactly sure how to fix it.

3. Her bow looks more in focus. I used a center focal point so that I utilized cross points, hopefully to have more in focus. I believe that I backed up to increase my DOF and didn't shoot wide open.

4. Way too dull and soft. IT's not sharp enough. I ususally position the focus point on her eyes, but she was looking down. I think I uces my center focal point for this too. I prob could have stopped down the aperture some to increase DOF. However, believe it or not, even with my flash (which had a self made diffuser) I was not able to stop it down very much because of limited light.

6. Grainy as a result of having to pp it too much. It was quite dark so I needed to use some fill light and expose it more in pp, which made it look oisy. To compensate, my sharpening of the eyes actually made it look awkward.

 

[AMOMENT]

2 was not my worst, but I could have use a little more fill light. I do find that when I do use fill light, it makes my photos a little noisy. I needed a lot because i used my pop up flash which I've been told is too harsh so I diffuse it with toilet paper. (I have no other light source right now.) and even though I raised the ISO to avoid using a flash, the photo I had gotten during trial was worse than these. I even raied my exposure compensation and stopped up my aperture to as much as possible but didn't want to loose too much dof. (which I still did anyway)

7. is out of focus. I used center focal point for this too because if I used any other than I would only be able to focus it on one of the girls' eyes. I was limited in increasing my DOF because of the lighting situation and not being able to stop down my aperture too much to nail the focus through greater dof. I also used spot metering, which I know has nothing to do with focus. I used single point as well. What could I have done differently, besides everything?

 

[AMOMENT]

Also, my images were sharper but when I added fill light in my pp, it made them much grainier.

 

[SurfCityJohn]

Kids can be very difficult to capture. They like to move a lot as evidenced in your photos. Shutter speed should not drop below 1/250. What do the rest of you think?

Control aperture for DoF. ISO for grain. Truth be told.. you just needs LOTS and LOTS of light.

Keep at it, I can see improvements.

 

[MTVision]

Also, my images were sharper but when I added fill light in my pp, it made them much grainier.

Fill light in photoshop isn't the best to use and if you do use it - it should only be a little bit. Your pop up flash, by powering it down, should be used as fill light. Fill light, in photoshop, brightens the photo up so thats why you get noise. When you raise exposure or lighten the photo the image gets noisier. If you raise your ISO, you should overexpose it to the point right before the highlights start blowing out. Then in photoshop you can lower the exposure and you won't have as much noise. You could have used a higher ISO so you didn't have to use the flash. Try getting exposure right in camera all the time and that will reduce noise. The LCD screen on the camera is too bright at its default setting. You should try lowering the brightness. I know on my camera, my photos would look bright and exposed good but then when I uploaded them they were really dark. I lowered the brightness on my LCD to -2 and now it works it better.

Try getting lower - you are still shooting down on them or at least not at their level. If you got lower the grass wouldn't be the background and then the background would look more blurred.

Did you try cloning the eye in #6? Looks like she has part of her blue eye on her eyelid. I don't think there is anyway to photoshop out the green sheet - without the photo looking strange.

 

[KmH]

If a digital image is underexposed, adding light post process makes image noise much more visible.

Digital photos don't have grain, they have noise.

With film, grain was the physical size of the silver halide particles that were sensitive to light. The higher the ISO of the film, the larger the particles were, making them more visible in the photo.

Digital noise is controlled by making sure the exposure is correct. Digital noise can be corrected to some extent by using de-noise software, but some detail is always lost. De-noising is one side of a coin, the other side of the coin is image sharpening. Real World Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop, Camera Raw, and Lightroom (2nd Edition)

With film we exposed for the shadows and let the highlights take care of themselves.
Because of the way digital images work, we have to expose digital images for the highlights and let the shadows take care of themselves.

The concept even has an acronym, known as ETTR - Expose-to-The-Right which refers to a digital images histogram. The histogram is a graphic representation of the luminosity distribution of the pixels in the image.
ETTR posits that we want as many pixels as possible on the right side (the most luminous side) of the histogram with few if any of them being all the way to the right.
ETTR

Learn Photography Concepts Look under the section: Qualities of Digital Photos

Photo Editing Tutorials Look under the section; Tones and Contrast.

 

[AMOMENT]

Thanks!!! How do I review my highlights? Basically they are "blown out" when they are flashing outside of the edges of the subject/image right? I powered down my flash to 1/2 and changed my lcd screen to -2. For some I got down but had that awful green sheet which I had no choice to use because my backyard was saturated. I wanted to take advantage of the day because it was warm enough to get outside with sleeveless dresses.

 

[MLeeK]

You are still always looking down on them at least a little. Get LOWER!!! With kids you rarely want to look down at them in any way. You want to get down on their level or lower even.
You are also still throwing flash in there and that's something you need to stop doing until you understand what you are doing with exposure-3.
You still have some pretty major focus and composition issues.
There is some motion blur in these as well as missed focus.
You have moved in so tight that your compositions are pretty poor overall. You have chopped off important parts of their little bodies/hands/arms/feet/backs/sides. Every one of them is in so close that you have made sure that you can't make them a good composition. If your composition is too lose in camera you can tighten it in cropping. If it's too tight in camera you can't manufacture the rest of the photo.
Back up, sit down and slow down. This isn't that complicated if you would relax and play with your girls instead of this. You will get much better shots if you are concentrating on THEM, give yourself more room for cropping down the line and relax. set your exposure first, then play with the girls and click as you do it.
Maybe even put your camera on a tripod at just above ground level and step away from it with a remote. Play with the girls all the while firing the shutter as you step back... Everyone has seen one of those goofy photographers who has the remote in one hand and a funky toy in the other playing almost a game of peek-a-boo with a child and looking like a total dolt. There is a reason they do it... IT WORKS!

You are stubborn in this process and insist upon using flash. That is a problem. You MUST learn to shoot without it before you learn to shoot with it. It changes everything. You will never get it all together if you don't learn in steps. You constantly throw EVERYTHING in at once in stead of concentrating on little pieces and you are spinning your wheels because of it. YOu are working on posing and flash and exposure and composition and movement and focus... all while working with the hardest subject any photographer will ever photograph-their own children. I can photograph anyone else's children but my own? That is HARD!!! And mine are 15, 16, 20 and 23! NOT 1 and maybe ?3? Those are hard ages!

We've told you to practice the elements one at a time on inanimate objects. So you refuse to use the kleenex box or monkey, OK. But you are still trying to work on EVERYTHING and are paying attention to none of it. You can't get any one thing to work if you aren't paying attention and teaching yourself how to do it. This needs to be added in layers. Once you master THIS, then you add THAT...

Actually, I am wondering if we can do anything to help you at this point. I want to, but it seems like you are taking a step forward, but then throwing it all out the window a day or two later because you want to do what you want to do when you want to do it. Doing this that way is going to take FAR longer than it will if you take it in the layers and try what we are telling you. You said yourself the other day your images from when you first got your 50 look better. There is a reason for that..
Tell us how to help you better?