Getting Better?

[keyairuh14]

I know that I'm not anywhere near professional, but I keep getting more and more excited with the more pictures I do in my studio. I feel proud of myself haha. If you have criticism I will take it! It is what I need to do better with my work. This is the most updated studio edit I have and would like to know what I could do better. Thank you!
Nikon D5000
F/5
1/60 sec
ISO-800
Max aperture 4.7

[edbayani]

beautiful shot of the baby.although too centered. also if you can brighten it a bit in levels. move the right slider to the left where the histogram starts to rise.

[kevingeary]

I think the main thing you can ask yourself is, where is the impact going to come from? What's going to make this shot creative?

In photography, there's three main things that I would say create the impact in a shot like this: light, bokeh, and perspective.

In this shot, the perspective isn't anything special right? It's straight on, eye level. The bokeh is not too prevalent and doesn't add anything to the shot. So that's two strikes. The last thing that could save the shot is lighting, but the lighting is flat. For all I know, you bounced a flash off the ceiling with a fill card and called it a day.

I think if you start to experiment with just adding in creativity in one of the three areas, you'll start to see some things change. And then if you can hit two of three, even better. And eventually three of three.

[BigFuzzy]

Originally Posted by kevingeary

I think the main thing you can ask yourself is, where is the impact going to come from? What's going to make this shot creative?

In this shot, the perspective isn't anything special right? It's straight on, eye level. The bokeh is not too prevalent and doesn't add anything to the shot. So that's two strikes. The last thing that could save the shot is lighting, but the lighting is flat. For all I know, you bounced a flash off the ceiling with a fill card and called it a day.

Well said. Pretty much my thoughts, though to me at least, it seems you simply used pop-up straight on flash. That, to me, always kills an image (as I noted in my post on your last image ). If you're going to start doing studio work, you really need to invest in a couple of studio or hotshoe flashes that you can fire off-camera. Until that day comes, all the improvement you make will be stymied by this limitation in my opinion.

I'm glad to see you're happy with the progress you've made, but seriously consider what Kevin said about what can you do to make your images different because, if I had to be perfectly honest, I've seen this shot lots of times from any mommy with a camera except you put more thought into the set up and background to keep it from being a mere snapshot which is a good first step.

Small details: try to keep folds/wrinkles in background from giving away that you pretty much hung up a sheet/blanket as a background and smooth out the blanket in front of hte baby so has to show the hands.

keep posting!