Child Portraits for C&C

[sjluto]

Some shots from my stay with mom and my nephew this past week. We went to the zoo and he was being very camera friendly!

Sorry, in a bit of a hurry. If you need the picture specs for any of them let me know! Gotta run, and thanks so much for your feedback. My biggest goal in photography is to take pictures of kids and families. All C&C that I can get is welcome!

 

[Bitter Jeweler]

*ugh* I have such a hard time critiqueing people shots.

*deep breathe*

#1 I think is compositionally sound. I don't mind the head crop. Mom's forehead is kinda blown, but you still have good light on the faces. I wish your mom wasn't wearing sunglasses.

#2 is nice, maybe a wee bit overexposed? I like how you filled the frame. I am seeing that it isn't very bothersome when you crop (in camera or post) tops and sides of heads off.

#3 is my favorite. I was thinking you could probably darken it a little, and I think this is approaching being a Low Key image. Somebody might nail this for cutting off elbows, but here again it doesn't bother me. Focus is on the face and that smile. Nice shot!

I darkened it for comparison...

#4 Ok, I have to draw the line at cutting off his chin. Why would you do that to such clearly happy boy? He looks like he enjoyed the photo shoot in all these images.

 

[musicaleCA]

#3 is charming, but I think I would have liked a background other than black. Darkened by Bitter it does look better; less "flashy".

#4, aside from cutting off the chin, there's that nasty shadow in the background. Bouncing the flash off the ceiling, diffusing it...something, would have helped, methinks.

And one technical thing: Adobe RGB is hit-and-miss at best on displays. Best to keep it to sRGB when you display things online, because monitors can generally only stay within the sRGB gamut. An image in the Adobe RGB colour space has to be remapped to the sRGB colour space when it's displayed; it usually results in some washed-out colours, particularly greens.

On to the good stuff: Effective use of fill flash in the first two shots. I don't think they're underexposed at all. ^.^

 

[InTheShoot]

They are lovely photos!

I am a noob, so I won't be giving any kind of tech critique at all, but just what I notice as a viewer...

I found 1 & 2 a little disappointing because there is no depth to your nephew's eyes

However - in 3. you managed to catch them perfectly! It is definately my favourite!

You fill the frame which is great (an area I need practice in!)

Well done!

 

[sjluto]

BJ, thanks! Excellent critiques. The sunglasses was a bummer, but it was more of a snapshot on a day out that turned out nice. I like the darker take on number 3. Definitely better. As for the chin cutting, it was either cut his chin off, or have a gigantic table leg cutting through the bottom of the picture. I thought it was distracting and wanted the focus to remain on his eyes and smile, not the table leg. I wish it could have been different.

I think that's the trouble with taking portraits. Sometimes you can't help the circumstances of some photos. As with the chin cutting as well as the elbows, it was either cut off the chin/elbows or have the picture lose some of its effect with distractions. When working with kids I don't like to set up the photos, I like to just capture them in the moment.

Musicale: I'm not sure what I could have done about the background. I darkened it, again, because there was so much going on in the background that it took away from his face. I still have a lot to learn about my camera and I'm sure I can remedy these problems in the future.

As for the technical suggestion, I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about. I looked at my settings and under view it says I'm on CMYK. There is no option for sRGB. I'm pretty good with computers, but I've just touched the tip of the iceberg with photoshop. Could you clarify?

Thanks so much!!! I really appreciate the critiques. Keep them coming!

 

[Omitinibu]

Im also a newb but il still give my point of view.. but before i do i dont like to repeat what others already have said so il agree with 2 being slightly over exposed and the fact that 4 has the top and bottom of the face cut off kinda kills the pic.. as for my other observations

1) its a little distracting that the child is looking 1 way while the mother is looking at the camera (of course i understand that children will be children and have the tendency to lose focus very fast and easy) but this is why I usually take more than 1 pic so i can pick between them for the best overall...

3) this image is underexposed toward the top.. his head disappears and that kinda kills the photo for me.. im usually the type that doesnt like parts of a person to be cut off unless done intentionally however that didnt bother me in this picture and the only thing that did was the disappearing head trick..

but all of the pictures came out very well and the 2nd one will have to be rendered as my fav.
great pics keep them coming..
Joe

 

[musicaleCA]

If the background was detracting from the portrait than underexposing it away is fine, I think. It wasn't so much that as the "flashy" look the photo had because of the stark contrast between his face and the black background.

Well, let's get this out of the way first: RGB is what your monitor uses to display colours. RGB colour spaces are called additive colour spaces, because you increase the values of the primary colours to get white. CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) is a subtractive colour space, because you subract values from the colours to get white. RGB is used on monitors, CMYK for printing. And important distinction to make and understand.

Second, colour management is a hairy, tricky thing to come to terms with, I find, and I couldn't possibly explain it to you in a post. You need to go out and do some serious reading, but for a quick brief: colour values in an RGB colour space run from 0 to 255. So, a pure, bright red bould be 255 red, 0 green, and 0 blue, say. In sRGB, the range of what actual colours are displayed along that scale of 0 to 255 is called the gamut. Adobe RGB assigns its 0 for each colour a little wider (oh boy, this is terrible terminology I'm using) in the range of visual colours than sRGB; it's gamut is bigger (note that sRGB does't actually contain all of the volours of the visual spectrum in its gamut, nor does Adobe RGB). The problem is, when you display an image that has an Adobe RGB profile on a device with a gamut smaller than that profile, the colors have to me remapped to values that fit into that smaller gamut so they can be displayed. And that tends to wash-out colours and darken the image as a whole.

Gods, I hope I didn't lose you.

tl;dr: check that Image -> Mode is set to RGB. And if you aren't shooting RAW and intend to display things online primarily, it's worth just shooting sRGB to save time and sweat and tears in the short term. The JPGs above have been assigned the Adobe RGB profile; if you're on a Mac checking this is as easy as looking at the file's info.

*head explodes from trying to explain colour management* I didn't give a very good description; sorry. Best that you try to read-up on it as much as you can. Personally, I don't think you'll get much out of printing in a colour space with a larger gamut, but if you foul-up colour management somewhere in your workflow, some really wacky things can happen later.

 

[Omitinibu]

Gods, I hope I didn't lose you.

Lmao you lost me a few times there but i finally got it :thumbup: pls excuse the newbness in me thanks for the info though

 

[musicaleCA]

It's totally fine. Being totally honest, I still don't get colour management completely. It's a terribly complex technical subject when you really get into it (there are people who make careers out of printing for a reason); really why I'll just call a lab and get their help if I ever want to do professional prints.

 

[sjluto]

Lol. That's going to take some time to figure out. My husband "paints" on his computer and is always talking about this stuff when he goes to print. He says it never looks the same and he has to adjust the monitor and such. I get lost... :er:

Anybody else have critiques?

 

[Bitter Jeweler]

Basically, Adobe RGB has a wider range of colors than sRGB, and if I remember correctly printers can also only display a portion of that (adobe). From what I have read, purples are the most difficult color to match from real life, to digital, to print.

What your husband is complaining about is that the he isn't getting all the colors from his digital image, or they look wrong. I have experienced that with my home printing too.

Ya'll can correct me if I am wrong. Somebody posted some reading about it here in this very forum
Hope that helps.