Four Little Monsters

KerrBear

Celebrated my son's 5th birthday this evening. Colt is our neighbor boy, he's the one with the glasses. He has ADHD, can't you tell? LOL. I just love his facial expressions in most of these shots. CC is welcome because I'm real new at taking pictures of people. I prefer the not in pose looks. You really get some great expressions that way.

I posted all the good-ish ones because I want to know which ones you guys like the best or least and why so I can improve it. Maybe I'll be able to catch some awesome shots of strangers for Street one day.













What is that???





Should I keep the child on the far right in this photo or crop him out?

bfjr

1 & 2 and I think I'd like em better if you cropped some top off and were in B&W

TonyCooper

As the grandfather of a 5 year-old and a 6 year-old, I know how difficult it is to get one photo of 2 kids with both kids with their eyes open and good expressions. With 4 kids, the difficulty factor goes up considerably.

I don't know what you use for editing, but cropping doesn't have to be done in the same ratio as the image as it comes from the camera when you are posting to the web. You may be restricted to conventional ratios with prints, but not here.

In all of these photos you have too much space at the top or the bottom that detracts from your subjects. Wide, but narrow top-to-bottom, crops would feature your subjects better.

About birthdays...when my kids were this age, we had the birthday parties at home for the cost of a cake and few balloons. Now, the birthday parties seem to all be in "fun" places. One grandson is at a party today where they make teddy bears, and the other is at a party where they drive go-karts. It gets expensive, no?

KerrBear

TonyCooper wrote:

As the grandfather of a 5 year-old and a 6 year-old, I know how difficult it is to get one photo of 2 kids with both kids with their eyes open and good expressions. With 4 kids, the difficulty factor goes up considerably.

I don't know what you use for editing, but cropping doesn't have to be done in the same ratio as the image as it comes from the camera when you are posting to the web. You may be restricted to conventional ratios with prints, but not here.

I use Nero for now. I'm going to buy a good photo editing software once I have the money. I blew it all on my kid's birthday and my daughter's 1st year birthday is in a week. : No money for me for awhile.

I cropped but there are some questions on to where I should crop that I listed in the OP. I also made the first two BW. Any other suggestions?

TonyCooper

KerrBear wrote:

I use Nero for now. I'm going to buy a good photo editing software once I have the money. I blew it all on my kid's birthday and my daughter's 1st year birthday is in a week. : No money for me for awhile.

I cropped but there are some questions on to where I should crop that I listed in the OP. I also made the first two BW. Any other suggestions?

You can download (free) the FastStone Image Viewer 4.0 from http://www.faststone.org/ This is an excellent photo viewer with some editing functions like cropping. Also free is IrfanView at http://www.irfanview.com/ and you can crop with this. FastStone has other features that are very useful.

When you want to purchase a program, Adobe Elements is reasonably priced. You can buy Elements 6.0 or 7.0 for $20 to $35 on eBay. The current version is 8.0, but 6.0 and 7.0 have most of the features you'll need.