My First Portrait, please comment?

[MarkyMark2011]

Finally I have gotten away from all things that stand still and don't move when you photograph them and give you time to compose a shot. I am now dabbling in the world of portraits and hopefully model shots????? My first guinea pig is my wonderful daughter and decided it time to break the ice and give this portrait thing ago...LOL
So please all comments are greatly appreciated and I will take all your comments on board for bigger and better things? Many thanks Mark
The shot is straight out of the camera with the only thing done to it was a 3 shot HDR to give it a slight richer look.

[Woody]

Originally Posted by MarkyMark2011

Finally I have gotten away from all things that stand still and don't move when you photograph them and give you time to compose a shot. I am now dabbling in the world of portraits and hopefully model shots????? My first guinea pig is my wonderful daughter and decided it time to break the ice and give this portrait thing ago...LOL
So please all comments are greatly appreciated and I will take all your comments on board for bigger and better things? Many thanks Mark
The shot is straight out of the camera with the only thing done to it was a 3 shot HDR to give it a slight richer look.

Hello MarkyMark,

Pretty girl you must be proud.

can you please post some exif data of the picture.


Cheers,

John W

[graciousness]

Hi Mark and welcome to the critique section of DPS!

First thing first, it would help if you post the EXIF data so that people know the settings that you've used and can provide advice on that.

Having looked at the photo, the thing that struck me first is the lack of focus on the eyes. When doing portraits, the eyes are the most important thing to keep focused - you lose focus on the eyes and you lose the shot.

If you had the exif data, people can give advice on the setting. Judging from the photo, you needed to use a smaller f/stop so that (1) your depth of field is narrower and you get the blur on the foreground and background; (2) widen the aperture to keep that sharp focus on the eye area.

At the moment, the image looks quite busy because of all the leaves around and they are distracting. If they had been blurred, it would have been a lot nicer and keeping your subject centralised. I think it would have really helped if you had used a tripod to keep the focus really sharp, and then the lower f/stop would come to play when used.

Colour is ok as far as I can remember, so is the exposure (I think). It would help a lot better if you had posted the photo via flickr instead of doing it as an attachment. I can't click on attachment while responding.

I'm sure someone better will come along and advice you better - but I hope I've been of some help.

Ah, just one more thing - have you tried applying the rules of thirds on your shots? I think photos are generally a lot more interesting when this is applied on the composition.

Cheers!

[graciousness]

I've just had a second look at the photo -

All that green is actually what is distracting, and the orange/yellow tones.

Have you tried playing around with post processing and adding sharpness, contrast and re-doing the tones on this?

John Wood - HI!! You responded at the same time as me...hehe!

[NicoleScraps]

Yes, I think that a wider aperature (smaller F stop number) would have helped out a lot, throwing those background leaves out of focus. It is definitely not as sharp as it should be on her face. I can't say for sure why that happened without knowing more details about how you took the photo. Also I would say that you white balance is off...quite a bit.
I like the composition and pose though.

[SusanH1970]

Agreed with the previous posters, especially regarding the distracting background and definitely the white balance. I hope you don't mind, I had a play - I can take it down if you'd like.

Opened in ACR and corrected WB, added a bit of contrast via the clarity slider.
Opened in CS2, did a levels layer set to luminosity and adjusted the whites a bit.
Burned the highlights and midtones of the background at 10%.
Color balance layer to take some magenta out of her skin.
Crop and sharpen slightly.

Still not perfect, but you get the idea. This was about a 2 minute edit. There are still some color cast issues in my edit.

Your daughter is beautiful, what a great model to have!