Ok Im new at this so don't beat me layball: I'm going to see if Im learning anything 1st Photo: I love love love it!!! 2nd photo: Is another great shot but wonder if useing the RoT would have made it even better 3. I like it and Im pretty sure you were going for the odd angle but i think it would have looked better straight and maybe even shot from the back 4. to me looks a little over exposed and I would get the red out of his pupiles So there we go my first try at C&C if I wrong you can me tehehe
Sorry, I did mean to add that I chose these photos NOT as my favourites, or the ones I felt were the best from this shoot, but instead as the ones that I know aren't quite right or could be better and I want feedback on!! #4. I just used my flash for the first time after being given some guidance on this - still a work in progress, hence needing the C&C!!! #3. Yep, the angle was deliberate - I note the suggestion of this being shot straight and from the back - DID get a couple great ones like that - so this was one I needed C&C for!!
#4 is way overexposed, and don't practice too hard with the built in flash, it will almost always produce horrible results.
Crop 1 & 3 as verticals and have them printed (after un-rotating #3), they are fantastic. #2) Is a nice picture, but would have been even nicer if he was looking at the camera, even just a little. #4) If you have to use on-camera flash, try defusing it.
1 and 2 are underexposed. You need to learn what exposure means, so you can understand how your camera calculates it. Both 1 and 2 have un-even lighting, which is to say that there is a brighter spot in one area of the photo and a darker part in another. The camera sees the bright spot, then sees the dark spot, and tries to find an average for exposure. What happens is, either the bright spots end up being too bright (blown highlights) so that more light can be brought in to expose the darker areas, or the camera lets in less light to expose the lighter areas, which causes you to lose all detail in the darker areas. Get it so far? Great. Composition is better on #1 but.... *shrugs* like all of these, they're snapshots, with better attention to technical details they can live nicely in an album but the rest of us aren't going to appreciate them much. This means that you, as a photographer, need to be able to adjust the even-ness of light coming into the camera - either make the darker spot brighter or the lighter spot darker. You can make darker spots brighter by using a fill flash (get a SB-400 or SB-600, look them up on Amazon), or make the lighter spots darker by using a graduated neutral density filter. Using the filter isn't recommended though for hand-held work because when working hand-held, you need a quicker shutter speed - putting less light into the camera would require you to increase your shutter speed and throw your camera on a tripod (GND filters are generally used for landscapes where the sky is much brighter than the land part of the landscape, for example). Also, don't try to fiddle with a filter when what you really want to do is just pick up a camera and shoot. The composition is also wrong on #2 - if your son is going to face the left of the frame, then he should have space on the left of the frame for him to look into. Otherwise he's just looking into an empty border. Un-rotate 3, adjust composition to put their faces and torsos in the lower-right of the frame and more space in the center. It's nice to see that you got down on your knees for this picture. Think about the "trails" in the picture (the areas with no grass due to tire wear) - in photography, these usually lead to something. What's it leading to here? And his expression is nice but her's is a little pouty. 4) Harsh, harsh, harsh direct lighting. Oh God. He's even got a little red-eye swimming in the back of his retina. See about using off-camera flash - watch this starting from about the 6:00 mark. YouTube - Strobist Preliminaries It may be about a bowl of fruit and not a person, but you can see how light can be much more flattering when the source of it (the flash) isn't shooting right in their face. Again though with 4: see: composition, see: facial expressions. Just because you have a little bokeh (background is out of focus) doesn't mean you are done. And with all such threads: for those of you who say "I love it", stay away from C&C threads. If you don't know what you're talking about then you're not helping the other person improve, and you're not helping yourself.
Back up there a little big guy, it is possible to be encouraging while pointing out the flaws in an image as both SuperMom30 and I did. You can't expect someone to absorb what took you and I years to learn in one post.
Only reason why I even know this thread exists is because the OP saw my kind of response in another thread and asked in a PM for the same brutally honest feedback. Practice does not make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect: it's not enough to tell someone that their image is excellent when it patently is not, such feedback only encourages the practice of creating (from a technical standpoint at least) more snapshot-quality photos. It is the hope of posters like me that when we provide the OP with this kind of flood of information, at least the OP will get sopping wet to the point where hopefully the OP is encouraged to do some independent research (i.e. that's an interesting Youtube video, I didn't know good lighting was made that way, or hmmmm I think I'm going to Google what a GND filter is), even if most of the information misses the OP (i.e. the OP will not have a mentor standing by her while she shoots, and the OP will need to post for a good long time and get good, long, productive feedback until anything of merit shows). If your watergun misses the mark, the OP doesn't learn anything, and nobody's helping anybody.
