Excited child!

[Shar3105]

I don't often take the camera into the bathroom, especially seeing as my youngest has made it her personal mission to empty the bath out onto the floor recently. So, I manually adjusting the white balance on this to suit the natural light coming in from the bathroom window.

I'm stepping away from using the onboard flash, so I don't know if I'm doing the right thing but I'm bumping up the ISO to try to get a clear picture with the light I'm given. I like a wide aperture for a shallow depth of field, I haven't really gotten into shutter speeds yet ..

I think that this picture is a little underexposed and not completely focused (I think the camera may have focused on water rather than her) and given the situation, I don't think I could have done anything with the composition in terms of the background. This completely conveys her personality - I didn't want to edit her mucky face as that's why she's in the bath in the first place.

NIKON D3100, f/5.6, 1/100sec, ISO-1600, exposure bias +0.3 step, 48mm. No flash.

What else could I do to improve this given the time I had? I am getting quicker .. but it's only been a few days since I've stepped away from auto! I could re-touch her face but how else could I edit this to fix the picture?

[gturner]

Two things:

1. You need a faster shutter as there is too much motion blur. As you are already at 1600 ISO, you need a fast (wider aperture) This may be a limitation of your equipment. A 50mm 1.8 for $100, you would be able to shoot at 1/250th at ISO 800 at F2.8 for a much clearer image.

2. You need to up the contrast and vibrance of this shot, it looks flat. (look at how dull the coloured balls are at the back)

[Shar3105]

Thanks for that - I did experiement with the apertures and thinking back, I think I could have opened this one up a little more, I've used this camera at ISO3200 and the images I've had from that aren't noisy in daylight so I could have gotten away with that too.

I'll have a play around with the contrast and vibrancy .. This is really useful as I post-processing is something that I thought I was confident in, but really am not as far as fixing an image.

Thanks

[gturner]

You cannot PP an out of focus image - period, so get the big things right first and then worry about the rest.

You only need the face to be really sharp, the rest of the scene is a tap and toys (shapes for the background.) If you can shoot at F4 - even better.