Newbie vs B&W

[Maga]

Dear All,

I’m really excited I found this forum, as I would love to learn how to improve my photos!

I’m using a non-pro camera (Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-HX5), but if I feel that it is a handicap, I might move on later to something more pro. Since this camera doesn’t allow a whole lot of manual adjustments, I’m trying to use its pre-sets as well as possible, and I’m also learning more on post-processing.

So this is one of my first pictures that I like, but somehow I feel like much more could be done – but I’m not quite sure on what.

This pic was taken from very far away and is totally spontaneous, so most of the work on it was post-processing, dealing with what I had (please see details below).

Any advice would be really really welcome, whether it's on the shooting, equipment, composition of whatever you feel like can be done to improve it!

Thanks a lot for your time!

All the best
Maga

From Drop Box

F 5.5, Exposure 1/160, ISO-400, bias +0.7, Focal length 42mm, Time of the day, twilight. Postprocessing – BW conversion, tweaking shadows/hightlights/sharpness.

[Maga]

Hi, me again. After reading a lot of the critiques in this forum (it's so so helpful and amazing!!) I think I can try to put into words some of the things that are annoying me in this pic:

1) I find both her face AND the background interesting. So I'm probably giving equal emphasis to both, what makes the photo confusing?

2)If I were to blur one, either the face of the background, would photoshop be the choice program for it? I'm using Picasa at the moment.

3) The focus on her face is not as good as I wish it would be, since I was shooting from the distance with little light. Is there a way to improve that in the post-processing, without going for the "sharpen" tool?

Thanks a lot again!!!

[JFSanders]

Topaz infocus is a program that works with PS Elements or CSE5 that would bring her face into focus more. There are 30day trial versions online. It looks like you or the camera focused on the background instead of her face (eyes). If you can change the aperture to a larger number/smaller hole it will increase your DOF to include all elements of the scene.

Nothing wrong with your camera and the desire to master your camera's abilities will do you a great service.

Jim