Family portrait (kind of) C&C please

[indeedies]

My buddy let me practice with him and his kid today and I was hoping for some advice on how to make the shots better. I took about 200 photos and came away with about 20 I really like and another 10 that would look good if photoshopped a bit. Here's a mixture of ones that I thought were good and ones that need to be fixed because of lack of color or "popness" I guess.
1.

2.

3.

4.

You guys gave me some advice from my last post and I think I used what was given accordingly.

Thanks again from the new guy!

 

[indeedies]

And when posting should I post the larger size like #1 or the smaller sizes like the other ones?

thanks again

 

[Inst!nct]

And when posting should I post the larger size like #1 or the smaller sizes like the other ones?

thanks again

I personally prefer larger pictures, one can always click on them if they want them "full size". To the pictures, i feel like all of these pictures dont really have a lot of color in them, maybe all a tad desaturated, number 1 would be btter if it was less out of focus and also more bokeh, because i find my eyes leading away from the photo. The second one, not bad, again, i find the background a bit distracting, also i think his facial expression is a bit sketchy, might just be me though :greenpbl:. Um, the third one, not bad, im not sure wether they were looking at something interesting or just looking away, regardless, having them more to the left of the photo with the dog on their left would be best IMO. number 4, i feel its just akward for both of them, the colors are good though, so +1 on that, but just dont feel as if there really is an emotion going through that photo. But keep in mind, just my opinion, good shooting

edit: good pictures though, don't get me wrong, im just very nit picky

 

[manicmike]

I like the 4th one the best. The OOF background really makes the two of them pop out.

 

[Weaving Wax]

The color in the 1st and 3rd seem a little flat. Everything just blends together.

 

[Inst!nct]

The color in the 1st and 3rd seem a little flat. Everything just blends together.

Kind of random and completely off topic but lots of your pictures on your flickr are too tightly cropped IMO. Just wanted to tell you , no other way, but they'd be a lot better if you did that.

 

[Weaving Wax]

The color in the 1st and 3rd seem a little flat. Everything just blends together.

Kind of random and completely off topic but lots of your pictures on your flickr are too tightly cropped IMO. Just wanted to tell you , no other way, but they'd be a lot better if you did that.

You mean, not crop them? Funny you say that because I never really crop pics. That's how they're taken. You know, you could've PM'ed me about this. Maybe next time do that so we don't clog threads. .

 

[indeedies]

All the pics were about the same color stream as the first 3. I photoshoped (by that I mean image-adjustment-auto contrast ) the color back into the 4th one. I was shooting with my d70, 55-200mm, with f4.8-5.6 most of the time. I use aperature mode because if I try and do both speed and ap I spend more time with the camera than the subject lol.

In order to bring the colors back up should I have taken it off of auto ISO and shot with a lower (meaning larger #'s right?) f-stop?

It's extremely cloudy almost everyday and all my pics turn out like this. Obviously I'm doing something wrong

Thanks for the quick replies and I'll work on framing some more too.