Airborne

DavidS

My daughter having some fun on the swing.

Would this photo look better cropped tighter on the left and with the trees cloned out? My thoughts were the trees added a perspective of height and framed the shot. What are your thoughts? Does it looked overflashed? I had it dialed in at -2/3 FEC. There was an evening sun low on the horizon providing a good deal of light. C&C welcome.

slapshot

cool shot...makes me dizzy looking at it

It would be interesting to see more of trees, that may give it more perspective

ian408

I think this shot screams Wide Angle. A crop would only separate the viewer from the joy of the swing.

Looks like a hell of a lotta fun too! Nicely captured.

System

slapshot wrote:

cool shot...makes me dizzy looking at it

It would be interesting to see more of trees, that may give it more perspective

yeah, this is hard to look at!-

I dunno, I think the exposure looks pretty good and I like how the light is on her-

I like ian's idea of the wide angle-

a very neat shot-

Nimai

I was actually thinking it might look good with less/no trees - make it really dizzying!
Great shot.

DavidS

Thanks Slapshot, Ian, George and Nimai for the suggestions and encouraging words. I like the idea of a wide angle, but I don't think it would have been possible here. If I went any lower I would have included some ugly housetops and it would have destroyed the illusion of height. (She was swinging quite high, but not as much as it may appear.) I don't think including any more above the shot would have helped. I also like the dynamic line created by the chain in this particular crop.

It was a fun shot to do. I was laying on my back shooting up. I had to shoot a number of shots to catch her fully extented and fully in the frame.

Here is one with the trees cloned out for Nimai.

photogmomma

I really like it! The last one should be cropped really close, in my book. I'd love the look of her just hanging in the middle of nowhere with that great look on her face!

Great shot!

Nimai

DavidS wrote:

Here is one with the trees cloned out for Nimai.

Hahaha~ Cool!
It looks totally ready for a print add, or something. I think it looks very professional!

macmac

I like the crop. It puts her out there in no where -- just her and the sky, with the chain and the bar perspective.

WrenTheBlurry

Heheh, awesome capture! She sure looks like she is going to go falling off that swing if she gets any higher. I originally thought it would be a mistake to take the tress out, figuring they help place her and set the scene. However, after seeing the new one you posted, I prefer that. Very nice!

happy day,

wren

DavidS

Thanks for the comments and encouragement Andi, Nimai, Joe and Wren.

peterst6906

What about this crop also:

urbanaries

peterst6906 wrote:

What about this crop also:

peter....the problem with your crop is it isn't a print size (that I know of). Most children portraits are taken with the intention of printing?

David...this shot is great, I just love swing pictures, and am SO excited spring is finally here so I can get better at them myself! I thought I liked the trees for perspective, but after seeing them cropped out, I'm focusing more on the exuberance of the girl than how high she is swinging. Depending on your intention for the photographs...either works remarkably well.

The skin tones seem a bit red, but it could just be me.

mmroden

I really like the first one of all of them. The trees add to the up-side-downedness, and as far as I can tell on this monitor of mine, she's perfectly exposed. The bar in the upper right does well, again, to emphasize that she's upside down.

Nice shot!

DavidS

Thanks for the suggestions and compliments Peter, Lynne and mmroden. My personal favorite is my second one. I like the simplicity of no trees. I also like a broader crop in that it gives more sky and more of a feeling of height. Lynne, I don't think my versions are as red as Peters. Are they too red?

urbanaries

DavidS wrote:

Thanks for the suggestions and compliments Peter, Lynne and mmroden. My personal favorite is my second one. I like the simplicity of no trees. I also like a broader crop in that it gives more sky and more of a feeling of height. Lynne, I don't think my versions are as red as Peters. Are they too red?

definitely peter's is more red; however yours still looks like it has a slight reddish orange glow to the skintone, but I wouldn't take that to the bank. Maybe someone with a calibrated monitor and more color experience than me can give you the yea or nay.

peterst6906

urbanaries wrote:

definitely peter's is more red; however yours still looks like it has a slight reddish orange glow to the skintone, but I wouldn't take that to the bank. Maybe someone with a calibrated monitor and more color experience than me can give you the yea or nay.

Yeah, it;s definitely more red, although I didn't conduct any color correction at all. I only cropped and converted to sRGB and re-posted.

So if the original post is in Adobe RGB, it probably needs some correction because most browsers won't display the colors correctly and they'll appear less saturated.

Regards,

Peter

peterst6906

peterst6906 wrote:

Yeah, it;s definitely more red, although I didn't conduct any color correction at all. I only cropped and converted to sRGB and re-posted.

So if the original post is in Adobe RGB, it probably needs some correction because most browsers won't display the colors correctly and they'll appear less saturated.

Regards,

Peter

So, just for comparison, I corrected the skin in this quickly, which also bought out the blue of the sky a bit as well:

digitalpins

great shot, I like both versions and the one with her and only the sky is great!!!

Awesome shot

gpphotos

the best thing about this image is def. her face and hair! she looks like she's just having a ball...and its great that she looked at the camera...this is a very creative shot, i think with a little work it could be submitted for photo of the year. (are we still doing photo of the year with the new contest going on?)

DavidS

peterst6906 wrote:

So, just for comparison, I corrected the skin in this quickly, which also bought out the blue of the sky a bit as well:

Thanks Peter. I really like what you did here. The skin tones are better and the sky looks much better as well. Did you follow the DGrin Tutorial or use another method? I tried i2e, which usually does a good job on skin tones, but it did a terrible job on this one. Please let me know what you did if it is not too complicated to expain. Lynne, I appreciate you drawing this too our attention.

DavidS

Thanks digitalpins and gpphotos. I appreciate the feedback and kind words.

DavidS

How are the skin tones on this one? I'm not too good at judging this. I tweaked the sky a little on this one as well. Is my cloning poor on this one? I'm having a hard time with that. (Forgive me if I'm beating a dead horse with this picture.)

peterst6906

Hi David,

I'm working off my laptop computer at the moment (5 weeks in Terre Haute Indiana and 1 week to go before heading home to Europe and then taking a holiday back to my original home in Sydney, Australia).

But anyway, the purpose of that was to point out that my screen is not calibrated at the moment, so I worked purely from the numbers and didn't rely on adjusting by eye.

Working in CS2, I placed a color sampler on the skin and then adjusted the red, green and blue curves until the CMY for the sampled spot (in the info palette) matched typical values for caucasian skin.

So, to answer your question, yes basically I followed what is suggested by Dan Margulis in Professional Photoshop 5th Ed., and Lee Varis in Skin. Professional Photoshop is used as the basis for the tutorial on dgrin.

If you are having trouble with your color correction, then my only suggestion would be to keep at it. I struggled a bit at first, but I've taken an approach of trying to work on as many images I can (and C&C forums are a great place to find images that people are asking for help on).

After a while it becomes fairly natural and now I've developed a few other techniques that give me some short cuts under certain circumstances.

I'm no expert and still have a long way to go, but I can only say, if you want to become proficient at it, you can develop a good set of basic skills pretty quickly.

Regards,

Peter