Friends of my wife. First family shoot. Please comment.

scotthofferphotography

Took these the other day, what are your thoughts? First family shoot I have ever done.

1.


2.


3.


4.



5.


6.

novicesnapper

#2 is awesome to me, spot on, beautiful eyes.
I might crop a little more on #4 and #6.
To bring her forward on #4 to see her expression more, nice expression
#4 her left (closest) arm has something on it in the elbow?
#6 to cut out the bench end on to avoid distracting eye wandering

All in all a lovely shoot and a lovely family, thanks.

scotthofferphotography

Thanks for the awesome comments.

JimKarczewski

I have to disagree with Novice.

-Take the camera OFF program mode! Learn to shoot manual especially when you are shooting multiple subjects at the same location. Your exposures flip flop and so does your white balance (Seems your camera was set in P, and AWB) from the EXIF data...

-Learn to read your histogram. Your shots are anywhere from 2/3 to a full stop underexposed in the face. I've gone into PS and changed exposure and overlaid it with your original. Quite the difference. If you need to, which come to think of it, I'm not sure the Rebel has, spot meter the face and then use that as a starting point for all of your photos.

- in the group shot, you really need to work on increasing the size of your light source. Be it a softbox/umbrella with your lights or a very large reflector. Dad and the daughter next to him, I can't (at least in the posted size) see any light in their eyes and they look dead.

Here are the exposure adjustments from photoshop:




1 and 2 have no arms in them, 3 is distracting with it, plus too far behind the tree where the others were out front.. 4&5 work but once again, underexposed. If you want your subjects and your surroundings to match you're going to have to kick that flash power WAY up.. or you will have blown out backgrounds (nothing against them but really don't know what you were looking for)

scotthofferphotography

Thank you for your expert advice.

novicesnapper

Good point Jim. I have a tendency to run my images a smiggen dark, but I think it's in the eye of the beholder. Some like high shots, some like a tad darker shots. I guess I'm the later lol. I wasn't sure on #1, the composition was nice, but I didn't have an opinion either way. I was thinking I would had dodged her face #2, ever so slightly, in PS to remove the slight tree shadow, if I was going to go that far. But always learning here for sure

Foques

Jim is, pretty much, spot on..
Novice, you want to run your images a wee brighter if you plan on printing them.. Learned the hard way.
Besides, most of the people want to have a nice, light, happy portraits - brighter ones.
Darker images have their own place, and not any less important place.

novicesnapper

Thanks Foques. It's actually a habit I'm working on changing lol. My monitor isn't calibrated, so I can't be sure what I see, is what others see. I certainly appreciate all I read here, and love coming to see the different techniques and skill sets people share.

JimKarczewski

novicesnapper wrote: »

Thanks Foques. It's actually a habit I'm working on changing lol. My monitor isn't calibrated, so I can't be sure what I see, is what others see. I certainly appreciate all I read here, and love coming to see the different techniques and skill sets people share.

There in lies a problem too. If you don't have a calibrated monitor... well... uh.. you really can't tell anything. Even worse is if you aren't working in a color aware browser... because if you look in the browser and then open the same photo in a color aware app like photoshop, they look COMPLETELY different! I use chrome, which isn't color managed... so when I want to look at something correctly, I have to use Safari for Windows or another color managed browser. Not only color but also brightness to an extent.

Huey Pro is pretty cheap and works pretty nice, if you are going to do anything color critical you should really invest in one!

scotthofferphotography

When I open your photos Jim in photoshop, and compare it to mine, yours looks completely overexposed, where mine looks normal to me? I guess without a color calibrated monitor, you never know really what your posting even.. or even seeing of other peoples work? Sometimes my prints are printed darker than what I would have wanted, and sometimes they come out lighter than I wanted, and then sometimes they come out just awesome. I guess its where this is coming into play?

Foques

^
your images are underexposed. for an official portrait, they are a wee too dark.

ought to get that calibration tool.

JimKarczewski

novicesnapper wrote: »

Thanks Foques. It's actually a habit I'm working on changing lol. My monitor isn't calibrated, so I can't be sure what I see, is what others see. I certainly appreciate all I read here, and love coming to see the different techniques and skill sets people share.

scotthofferphotography wrote: »

When I open your photos Jim in photoshop, and compare it to mine, yours looks completely overexposed, where mine looks normal to me? I guess without a color calibrated monitor, you never know really what your posting even.. or even seeing of other peoples work? Sometimes my prints are printed darker than what I would have wanted, and sometimes they come out lighter than I wanted, and then sometimes they come out just awesome. I guess its where this is coming into play?

Yup, I would say you need to get some kind of calibration device for your monitor. You can eyeball it, but that's not the real way to do things. With devices like the huey pro (http://www.pantone.com/pages/products/product.aspx?pid=562) for $99 you take care of a lot of your print/screen issues by having a correct color/brightness set on your monitor...

However, I will say, not all monitors can be correctly calibrated either. I now use an HP2475w (wide gamut) which is much better and easier to calibrate than my old Samsung, which now sits as a palette monitor to the left of my HP.

scotthofferphotography

I only have a toshiba laptop and an Ipad.

divamum

You can use a Huey on a laptop - I do. iPad and iPhone have great screens - I use my iphone as a "checking" device; the colour/contrast is pretty good.

Agree these could use an exposure boost, but I think you did pretty well for a first time. Good looking family, you posed them nicely in the family shot, you used fill-flash to make sure you didn't get racoon eyes.

Watch your backgrounds in tree-d settings to make sure no branches/trunks growing out of heads - you mostly did well with that, but it's arguable in #5 whether it might be worth cropping in and/or cloning out the stuff right behind him.

The only one which I'd nix is #3 - it's not a flattering shot for her, and #4 is MUCH better of her.

scotthofferphotography

Thank you.

novicesnapper

Thanks all for the great suggestions, I love coming to this site, thanks.