What did I do wrong?!

[Diana1979]

I'm using a Canon Rebel XT with a 50mm lens.
I took these photos, thinking I was doing everything right--they looked ok on the screen. I was trying out my new speedlight--direct light, light pointing up, off to the side. I tried different settings on my camera--portrait, sports, aperture-priority, auto, etc. All of them turned out bad! What did I do?

[Nicole]

Ok, the first thing that I notice is that the shutter speed seems pretty slow for taking pictures of kids. Kids seem to move pretty fast, even babies. So, a shutter speed like 1/25 is going to give a lot of chance for movement, and even photographing handheld at that speed can create the risk of camera shake.

I'm going to point you to a basic article on learning about exposure over at the blog. Your last shot, taken at f/10, ISO 100 was pretty likely to be blurry with these settings (again, look at the blog article, and also read about shutter speed and aperture).

The second shot (boy, I'm out of order on this ), it looks like the bottom corner is in pretty sharp focus. Such a wide aperture means that only a small area of your shot will be in focus. If you have dynamic focusing on, or you have your camera set to focus on the closest object, this could account for why the blanket seems to be in focus, but not the baby.

And the first picture, again, 1/60 of a second still gives enough of a chance for movement.

Hope some of that helps. You'll get better with practice

[stevesutt89]

In the first picture, the shadow on the arm is casued by the foot. This is because the flash is not perfectly aligned with the lens (and never will be). Ie if the flash is positioned off to the left of the lens, then shadows will appear on the right hand side of things. The blur on the foot looks to be caused by motion from the baby. To fix this try a faster shutter speed (maybe in combination with a higher ISO setting/larger apeture (smaller number after the f/) or taking picture in brighter light).

This same problem is causeing the blurring of the legs in the second picture. Only it is enhanced by the fact that the apeture is wide open, creating a shallow depth of field. ie while the face is in focus, not much else will be.

In the third image, you've clamped the apeture right down, this has widened the depth of field, but as a result, the shutter has been left open for far too long. In this 0.8 of a second, the baby has moved a lot, resulting in motion blur.

While I like the colour of the lighting in the second two images, there just seems to be too little light for easy photography. in this situation, your only option may be to use the flash and risk losing this yellow lighting, or bump up the ISO setting a long way, resulting in more natural images that have a lot of noise. The choise is yours.....of course you could try shooting in a area with more light....if this an option