Portrait of my youngest daughter

[Shar3105]

I like the composition of this - except the toy behind her, but with children I guess we need to take our moment whilst we can. This was taken in her bedroom, next to her window so natural light.

I'm not entirely sure how I get exif data manually but I uploaded this to another website which pulls the data - so copied and pasted - NIKON D3100 : f/5.3 : 1/60" : 45mm : ISO 400

I would like to get better pictures of my girls so if I can do anything better, please let me know!

[JFSanders]

Hard to do much better than that smile. Babies are a special case and pretty much dominate whatever background there is. So the crib and toys do not bother me in a candid such as this. If you want to make them blurred you are going to have to do a couple of things. One open your aperture as wide as possible and move the baby as far away from the background as possible. Two if you have a sheer to put in front of the glass to diffuse the light would help to stop the hot spot on her forehead. Three add in a reflector on her right side to fill in the shadow slightly and you should be golden. Also, you might try draping a background of a neutral color behind her to hide the toys as well. But still use the reflector to get some fill on her other side.

Jim

[Shar3105]

Thanks Jim,

Yes, the smile is great - she's normally such a serious faced little one so to capture a smile is a rare one.

I don't have reflectors but I guess I could just use a White sheet to reflect the daylight and again, a sheet to hide backgrounds. I like to photograph with a shallow depth of field usually so I realise that this set up isn't quite right. I guess, in some cases backgrounds will be there and I think in this case that it's not too distracting. If I'd have had some sort of reflector, could I have slightly underexposed the picture to take the shine off her head (I don't have the equipment you suggest) the reflector doing the work of easing those shadows.

Now I shoot in jpg, if I'd done this in RAW, could I have fixed these problems?

Thanks, interesting ideas to go and try! And sorry for the questions back!

[JFSanders]

White sheet or white foam board from the office supply store. White sheet for the window. You can also play with bouncing the light coming through the window with crinkled aluminum foil over white board. Think of the direction of the light and how to get it bouncing all over the room. The more bouncing the softer it gets. So you can go too far. I once put colored sheets over a bright window to get a gel effect.

You can fix them in either RAW or JPG formats. RAW gives you more options in certain instances but any photograph done digitally with overexposure issues is almost impossible to bring back because a blown highlight has a pixel with a 255 value which is 100% RGB channels so there is no information to get detail from.

Let me run the photograph through NX2 and see what comes back.

Jim

[JFSanders]

Just a quick once over in ViewNX2 and the photo has no blown highlights! Good. Ran it through NX2 and adjusted the levels of the midtones to bring down the highlights a bit and sharpened her eyes and used the healing tool to clean up the cereal left on her cheek. I left the drool dribble but it could be healed as well.

Not sure if it is "better" than the sooc shot. But maybe you will like it better. If you had CSE3 or better you could spend some time creating a mask layer and blurring out the background or even cloning out the toy. Although it would be tough around those gorgeous curls!

[Shar3105]

Thanks again, I don't have any software - well, I use GIMP which I'm getting to grips with. Tight budget with these two girls! With that I could clean her up but I'm not really confident with changing tones. Is there where the histogram comes into play? I understand them and I refer to them after I've taken a picture and will try to re-take to fix the histogram. I realise that there are exceptions and no histogram is perfect. For experimental purpose, I might try to create the layer mask in GIMP and try to hide the toy, I hadn't thought about doing it - I'm scared of making the picture less natural - guess that's the great thing about digital huh!

Thank you so much for your advice, I look forward to learning more .. What inspired me is that the nursery had a Tempest photographer in and they took a few pictures of the girls but they didn't portray the girls personalities, my youngests hair had fallen wrong and didn't flatter her at all. She was also tired and so didn't really 'play' with the camera. I want to be able to take sort of semi professional pictures of the children myself without paying the over inflated Tempest prices!

[JFSanders]

Remember to always work from a copy when using a destructive editor program. One that writes over the original photo as you edit. Once you have your copy, edit away. If you make a mistake you will learn from it, this is a good thing. So don't let trepidation keep you from branching out.

It is much better if you can get it "right" in camera. So learning to see a scene like your camera would instead of how the mind sees. We build a scene in our mind by scanning really fast over a scene and the camera only captures one spot in time. The more you shoot and edit the better you will become.

Don't let Post processing become a crutch. It is easy to do, even for pros. See the light and all of its qualities and direction. Use that information to guide you in setting up your shot.

Jim