First Potrait attempt

[Donal]

THese are my first try at sitting my little girls down to take a "proper" photo of them. I've never taken any potrait photos before and I'd really appreciate any guidance of what to do or not to do.

The only PP was to change the saturation a bit, and to add the vignette to the first one and to increase the "blacks" in the second one. All done in lightroom.


Thanks in advance for your help.





EDIT:
Sorry for not including these when I posted...

Canon SX20 IS
f/3.5
1/50 sec
ISO 320

[Photologyst]

First, what charming, beautiful girls! Those eyes, lips, hair, these girls have everything.

The head shots are nice. The top one a bit too saturated, perhaps.

You might want to use more of a gausian/gradient blur on both photos since the furniture background is distracting. Great if one can see it, like a wing chair. Not so great if one can’t figure out what it is. On the first one the furniture seems to be cutting the picture in half. Experiment with some background color. I think a pale blue would be nice, given their colouring. Take some photos of clouds and see how those would blur up as a background.

I would like to see more of the bodies because, that way the sister relationship could come out more. How about some in the Irish countryside or a public park/garden?

Nice job!

[BigFuzzy]

Hi Donal,

On the surface, it's a nice shot that you and your family should be proud of.

If I have to dig deeper and really assess it as something more than a family snap shot, this is what I'd suggest:
First thing that jumped out at me, and believe me that this is purely a taste thing, not a right/wrong thing, is the white vignetting. I hate it. Others like it.. to me it screams "amateur using gimmicks".. I'm not trying to be harsh, but that's how I feel. I always see beginners (myself included) thinking "cool effect" and now it makes me cringe. (same with selective coloring ) Feel free to ignore this hehe.

Also, I would suggest (as would many others I think) that any portrait you take has the eyes sharp. Here, to me, they are clearly not. I think it's a result of two things: Slow shutter speed. The safest hand held speed is typically considered 1/60th of a second. Also, it appears that your focus is on the mouth of the girl on the left and not her eyes. I think you'll agree the teeth are definitely sharper than her eyes. .

I agree with photologyst about the background.. the line cutting through the middle is distracting. Checking the background, though crucial, was one of the things that took me the longest when I was starting off.

Lastly the satruation is a bit overdone for my taste. The lips particularly look saturated, so tone it down a bit.

In the end, you captured a nice moment which with a little more thought could be a cracker. Keep it up!