B&W Maternity

[Kelly24]

Hello all,

A good friend is pregnant and she graciously agreed to let me practice my photography on her!

Specific questions I have are:

How's the cropping?
What about the lighting? Is her face too dark?
I took the photo in B&W, both in Raw and Jpg, this is the jpg version
This is the original photo, no processing done to it.

Exif data:

Canon Rebel XTi
Exposure: 1/50
Aperture: F3.5
Focal length: 22mm
ISO Speed: 800

Thanks so much in advance for any tips or criticisms.

[zona5101]

This is a beautiful shot. I love her warm expression. Unfortunately there are some issues with it too. First it is underexposed. Your crop/framing and camera angle look fine. The composition suffers because of the large span of window/brightness across the top. The light from the window is super soft and looks great but you want to avoid having her nose lit like that. You just needed to turn her head/shoulders more into the light.
Wonderful she is willing to be your model.

[Kelly24]

Thank you Bruce! I knew there was something not quite right with the light and her face but I'm new to photography so wasn't completely sure of what the exact issue was. I'll know for next time to have her face pointed more towards the light.

Thanks again, I really appreciated your comments.

Cheers!

[mariselafm]

Also, the plant could have been moved so that it doesn't look like it is coming out of the lady's hair. I do like the composition of your picture; it os something different to the regular maternity shots we see everyday.

[Kelly24]

Good point Marisela! Thanks! I took a few outside pictures where afterwards I looked at them and thought "Why does she have a tree growing out of her head?" Ahh well, live and learn!

[Michael_nine22.com]

The big thing I see is that your eye will want to go to the brightest spot in the image.. in your case the window sill/outside the window and not your subject.

I like the angle and the composition(position of her in the frame, not the junk behind her), its great.


Can you salvage it? If you have to, what I will do is darken the image/recover the blown out and then paint the subject with adjustment brush and increase exposure/fill... usually less than 1 stop tho more than that it starts getting noisy and fake looking. if that doesn't do it completely maybe try a vignette.

[ttosifa]

Originally Posted by Michael_nine22.com

The big thing I see is that your eye will want to go to the brightest spot in the image.. in your case the window sill/outside the window and not your subject.

That's not always true, and I don't think it's true here. The statement is often made, but is easily shown not to be general.

The canonical counterexample to the statement above that your eyes go to the brightest spot is that of an image of a black dot on a pure white background. Your eyes go the black dot, not the bright background. In this counterexample, your eyes go to the darkest spot of the image.

The more general statement is that your eyes go to the area of highest contrast. In the specific picture below, my eyes are drawn to the relatively bright part of the left (her left) side of her face. It actually hurts my eyes to try to look at the blown out window. My eyes are "pushed away" from the window, not drawn to it.

The difference is important because it opens up new ways to take pictures with lots of light and perhaps blown-out areas.

With more even exposure across the face (which could have been gotten with another source of light, including a reflector), I think a viewer would have been drawn to her eyes, even with the blown out window.