Beautiful Family Pics in the Park

jhelms

I had a chance to photograph these good friends of mine Saturday at a local park.

I'm happy with how they turned out but as always would appreciate any C&C, as general or as detailed as you want.

Full gallery is here: http://www.johntookmypicture.com/gallery/6639847_rNy9M

BeachBill

I like #1 the best of these four.

#2 - I would suggest cloning out the slobber from the boy's chin. Missing catch lights in the eyes. And those trees growing out of dad and mom's heads bugs me. Moving the camera slightly to the left could have put the tree between their heads.

#4 could use some light on your subjects (with catch lights in the eyes) and a slight camera movement to the left to prevent those trees from clinging to their heads...

#3 My eyes keep going to the trees top center, and I also notice the out of focus area at the bottom. Now if the background trees were OOF and the leaves at the bottom were in focus I might like this one better.

Elaine

What a nice family and a nice setting!

The skin tones seem overly orange to me.
The light in 1 and 3 is better than in 2 and 4.
They have very nice expressions in all of them.
I love the comp of #4 but feel it's missing some fill. I bet with some processing it could be brightened up a bit.

Travis

That is a beautiful family and I think you did a great job posing the them, one of the more difficult tasks. Only one pose that looks a little unnatural/uncomfortable is the wife in #3. Elaine and Bill covered the critiques prettty thoroughly. The one addition that I would make is to watch the hands. In #1, the dads hands are cutoff and in #2, the wife's hands are cut off. I see in your gallery that image #1 was shot in portrait orientation and has the hands in their entirety. For the landscape crop, you want to consider moving the crop down a little to capture the whole hand. Don't know what to do about #3?

I agree that images #2 and 4 could use some selective lightening to bring out the subjects.

The DOF is great in the child shots.

jhelms

Thanks for the comments! Anyone have any issues with the striped sweater?

I thought it was fine, just curious since I know typically we go for solids.

Would some curves adjustments in PS help this one out some? I didn't do any but just recently picked up PSE7 and have been playing around with it...

BTW, here's a link to a 2nd set of 'family in the park' pics that I did last week, also ended up being my 1st try at any real post-processing: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=978938

ladytx

Nice posing and pictures. They seem pretty red to me also.