Child group photo

[clv]

Hi all,

once a year I get to take a group photo of my mother-in-law's 6 grand-children. The photo then gets a frame round it in PSE and the names of the kids added. She then sends it to everyone she knows.

Only having discovered this site recently, and being an amateur, I hope you can give me hints as to make this picture as good as possible.
My feeling says the contrast is not enough / the colours are not deep enough and that I sometimes feel it is not properly focused.

Happy to hear anything you say - good or bad!

Claire

Taken with:
Sony Cybershot DSC-S85
F-Stop: f2.8
Max. Aperture: f2.0
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 9.3mm

2010 11 07_0847x.jpg

[hciere]

I love the expressions you captured - what a great moment and so hard to do with multiple kids.

You should post your EXIF data as per the forum rules and I'm sure others can give a more technical critique than I can, but the two big things that distracted me where the distracting background and cut off boy on right. I think if you crop it so that it's a tighter shot on the left too and clone out the distracting elements like the blue chair, yellow shovel etc. it would help a lot.

I took the liberty of quickly mocking something up to show you what i mean. I also did a curve adjustment and enhanced contrast and vibrancy. You might want to do some sharpening as well.

Great expressions!

[clv]

Sorry about the EXIF - have just looked a other posts to see if I get it better this time!

Camera: Sony
Model: Cybershot DSC-S85
ISO: 100
Exposure: 1/200
Aperture: f2.8
Focal Length: 9.3mm


@hciere - thanks for the comments and your changes made: the un-cluttering of the background is great (which I wouldn't have thought of), as is the cropping! I will keep at the editing and see what happens