First Baby Portrait

[jak5887]

Hi,
Can you review my first "real" baby portrait. Taken on a Canon 40D with the kit lense. I used window light and a homemade reflector. I shot in Aperture priority.

f5.6
1/15 sec
ISO 400

At first I loved the shot b/c I was trying to have soft shadow on half of her face. The more I look at it I wonder if there is enough light and too much shadow?

Link to Picture:

[irishmuth]

It's hard to judge the lighting because it's underexposed. I pulled this into photoshop and when I adjusted the exposure, the lighting seemed pretty harsh. So in addition to the exposure adjustment, I did a shadows/highlights adjustment. With everything nice and evenly exposed, her skin tones looked overly red. So I did a selective color adjustment layer just on her face and lowered both the magent and the yellow in the reds. Then because the eyes were still lacking some light, I dodged each eye a little bit.

In order to avoid all this with the current light set up, you'll have to bump up your ISO or open up your aperture. I would't go any slower on shutter speed because it's pretty remarkable that this show is so sharp at 1/15.

Gorgeous and happy little girl! Hope you don't mind me posting my edit:

[jak5887]

Thanks for your thoughts. I don't have PS yet and only have access to processing software that came with my camera. And I really don't know what I'm doing with that!

I'm trying to get the exposure right in camera to avoid a lot of post process work. How do you avoid underexposure when you are trying for a portrait that has a really dark backround with only the face in the light?

[irishmuth]

You can make any background look black if you have significantly more light on your subject. I think if you had adjusted your camera settings (ISO or aperture) so that the subject was properly exposed, the background still would have been black in this instance. When I upped the exposure in Photoshop, the background remained pitch black without any further adjustment.

There are more knowledgeable people on lighting than I that can hopefully chime in as well.

It's definitely a good idea to get the best portrait possible straight out of camera, but if you need a decent free editor, Picasa is straightfoward and is perfect for slight adjustments.