I am not sure what is meant by the phrase "go off-site?" The photos ARE HERE, on TPF's own server. It's a single click to get to the image set, on a secure, TPF-owned server.
http://www.thephotoforum.com/gallery/albums/looking-for-feedback.911/
So, I looked at the entire gallery in thumbnail form, as well as clicked through the images. It took me a whole 90 seconds or so. My general C&C is this: the littler son is posed without a lot of his body showing. In group shots, he is often just kind of stuck in there as "a head". In the standing group shot, the littler son's head placement is poor. In group shots there are basic rules about head placement, and how heads need to be placed in relation to one another. Even though the younger son is much shorter than his brother, having their natural heigh difference in the shots is ungainly, and looks bad at times.
The mother was posed mostly square-shouldered to the camera, and her naturally large under-eye bags are illuminated and exaggerated VERy badly by the mostly overhead lighting. In the single shots of the mother, the background is put well out of focus, but the planes of her face are badly overexposed, and the skin tones are trending toward that sickly yellow that looks like over-exposed Nikon images to me. She is shown full-face, square-shouldered in every single shot, which is monotonous.
What you asked for was an evaluation of
an entire album's worth of family photos. The single biggest issue is that I see is that it is obvious that you do not have any posing strategies except full-face, squared shoulders, which makes this, as an album, very,very boring due to the constant repetition of square shoulders, full-face. Out of a little over two dozen shots, every single image has every person positioned square to the camera, and facing straight ahead. That means the body posing is static, not dynamic. The head and chest, both in alignment. On every person, in almost every,single shot. There is absolutely no posing technique in this entire set. No head angles, no body angles, just line em up and fire.
The background control on the singles of the mother looks like long focal length; the shots of the two boys together were done at shorter focal length, with intrusive background details. The mother's under-eye bags are exaggerated due to the overexposure and the light's direction and quality, and those eye-bags need careful post-processing attention, by using the healing brush or by airbrushing or cloning out the shadow density under the eye bags themselves. Do not obliterate the eye bags, or she will look like another person to her family and friends, but DO manage to get the under-bag shadows cut wayyyyyyyy down in intensity. That is the key when photographing a person with heavy under-eye bags; to minimize, but NOT eliminate, their true eye shape and facial look or nature. The overhead, yet still soft light has created very bad shadows, and eliminating this would have been possible with a LARGE fill-light source that would fill in that shadow. But now, the only recourse is in post.
Overall, this set looks mostly consistent in terms of color and exposure, but the mother's individual shots have bad lighting on her, and the processing on all the singles of her needs to be re-done to get rid of that yellow color cast due to the over-exposure.
A tip for little boys with early teen-aged brothers or with moms or dads: perch the little kid on the thigh of a seated person. In the second shot for example, the little kid is just "a head", and so is the mom...you put the older son and the dad on the rock in front, and the mom barely shows up. A MUCH better pose would have been the mom kneeling in the back, so HER head was at the top center, then the small boy seated on his dad's lap, feel inward-angled and dangling.
On the shot in the middle, with New Prague, again, the little kid is wayyyyyyyyyy low and insignificant. The dad's beer gut shows....the little kid could have been moved over to in front of his dad's sweater belly. The older son could have been placed in front of the dad's pooching sweater, the mom moved to the left outside, the little kid propped up on what is called an "apple box".
You're shooting in
a formal portrait style, but are not using any of the head spacing OR body positioning/posing strategies that are detailed in every book on formal portraiture. This is FORMAL portraiture,not informal, and has been done with no knowledge of posing fundamentals.The foreheads on most of these are VERY burned-out. The hot, over-exposed faces and foreheads does not jibe with the early autumn clothing they have on, nor with the overcast lighting conditions. I have no idea of your experience, and I do not want to hurt your feelings, but this is an example of shooting a family session and violating basically every single posing and compositional rule over and over and making the same mistakes in almost every single shot. You MUST angle people, at least some of the time. You need more than full-face, squared shoulders, and you need to expose and process properly, and appropriately. As The_Traveler mentioned some time ago, there is a line between directness and frank honesty and hurtful comments when offering C&C on a forum, and at times, it might seem that people are crossing the line. You asked for C&C on the album, and I will say that as an album, it is repetitive, and has the same exposure mistakes in most of the shots, and the posing is very much unstudied.
Ok. Do you suggest something like merging two different exposures to have it be more balanced?
