A shot of my daughter

[asherah]

I'm pretty new to photography. This is a pic of my 6 year old daughter I took today.
Do you think there is too much warmth ?


Thanks for any advice.
Asherah

[BigFuzzy]

Originally Posted by asherah

I'm pretty new to photography. This is a pic of my 6 year old daughter I took today.
Do you think there is too much warmth ?


Thanks for any advice.
Asherah

Hi Asherah,
First off welcome to DPS, I think you'll enjoy it here. Like any forum it won't always be perfect, but I think you'll learn a lot.

One thing I'd ask is to read the rules for posting in each section prior to posting. For example in Critique we ask for you to include the EXIF info which really helps many people understand your photo better so that we can give you better critiques.. plus it shows that you're willing to read the rules and many people will then be more willing to help you out. It'd also help if you said what lens you used so we can give more tailored responses.

As for the photo, whilst I don't find it too warm.. it does feel that it's a bit too saturated in general.
Having said that, the two things that I think need the most work are the background and lighting.
The background is really really busy and, to me, distracting. If able to, this can be fixed by using a shallow depth of field or by simply trying to find as 'clean' a background as possible.
The lighting hurts because her eyes fall in shadow so you can barely see them. In any portrait it's always important (at least to me) to have the eyes well lit. So if there were some way to get some fill light into her face (reflector, flash, etc) that would have really helped.

There's no doubt that this is a nice family snap shot that you'll like because it's your daughter.. and that's great. But if you're looking to really make it into something more than a snapshot for the fam album.. above are some things to start thinking of (ie background, lighting) to take it to the next level!

[asherah]

I'll check out the rules as I dont know what EXIF is. I took it with a canon elph powershot 12.1 mega pixel camera. I was thinking the same thing about the shadows on her face.
I bought a book on exposure so hopefully that will help.
I would love to get photoshop or maybe lightroom so I can blur the background a bit. Also a portable studio set up with 2 lights/umbrellas, and a background. That would be a big help.
I should also mention that the camera is set on portrait mode.
asherah

Edit to say that i would love to get Canon Rebel with a 50 mm 1.4 lens.

[ssssnake529]

EXIF is exposure information. What the camera settings were, when you took the picture. (lens aperture, length of exposure, ISO setting.) This information is usually stored as part of the picture file, but you probably have to use some sort of film editing software (did you get software with the camera?) to read the EXIF.

The reason EXIF is important is that focus, depth of field, lighting, etc. are all affected to some extent by EXIF. Upgrading your photography skills will rely to a large extent on learning to control these parameters.

[asherah]

Well I've since discovered that I can't adjust the depth of field on this camera. Great..I really need a decent camera.