Sweet Baby Boy

[lara9597]

This photo was taken in portrait mode indoors with natural light, no flash and 35-80mm f/4-5.6 lens. With that being said, I'm moving towards getting away from these presets and learning more about manipulating shutter speed, aperature, etc. Obviously, this picture isn't as sharp as I would like it to be. I tried to soften the skin some and blacked out the background, but my skills in retouching and enhancing are pretty much non-existent and those are the only things I changed. I'm using Lightroom 2 - any suggestions on touching up? What should I have done to prevent this picture from being blurry - what should I look at as far as manual settings? Any tips, advice, or suggestions on how to get a better shot next time will be greatly appreciated!



F Stop = f/5.6
Exposure Time = 1/60 sec
ISO 400
Focal Length = 68mm
Maximum Aperature = 4.97

[warcrier]

Cute kid!

You could lower your aperture and adjust the shutter speed to that. Also bumping up the iso will help you TONS. Bumping it up to much will make is noisy but don't be afraid of that. Its better to have a good shot with some grain then a bad one.

When it comes to touch up you could try and sharpen parts of his face a bit (don't go overboard though it looks bad when people do that). If that doesn't work one of my photography teachers always said to convert to black and white, It works pretty actually.

[lara9597]

Thanks so much for your feedback!

[Ambrosia76]

I have found with my 2 yr old Granddaughter, wide aperture and fast shutter speeds are the best, Babies literally never stop moving,sometimes not even when they are asleep.

[yulchick]

Not sure if thats what the original shot looked like, but since you said you did some skin softening, it looks like you went over the nose entirely and maybe some other pats as well, maybe thats why the oulines of the nose/nostrils look blurry..

When I choose to do some skin softening on the face of my lil ones, I soften everything leaving out the eyes, eyebrows, and outlines of the nose, any dimples,and lips..that was the picture still seems sharp but with a soft skintone.. well at least thats what works for me

[Marie92578]

When blacking out the background try feathering or softening the edge when cutting that will help that sharp line from subject to background.

[lara9597]

All great advice! Hopefully I'll have time to play around some more over the weekend and make some improvements! What editing software do y'all use?