Help with child candid

[-g-]

What do you think? Can it be improved?

Thanks.

http://i243.photobucket.com/albums/ff44/genodm/portraits/IMG_7438-Edit2copyBW.jpg

[DragonDan]

at ISO 800, you think you could have gone with a faster shutter speed. 1/30th is a bit slow for portrait work at 24mm. Maybe a longer focal length and faster SS would have sharpened the pic up a bit.

[Robert_Lay]

Almost anything can be improved upon, but in this case there are no obvious problems.

It seems a little overexposed, but that's a nit pick.

I cannot tell where the focus is, but it should be on those eyelashes but they don't look sharp to me. It could be that the low resolution is responsible for that. You should satisfy yourself that it is as sharp as it should be on the original, full resolution image.

Unless your lens is Image Stabilized, I would not try to get away with 1/30". That's a little too long for hand held if the ambient light is primary. Of course, I can't tell from here whether the flash dominated or not.

[JenniferLShort]

I agree with all of the above. I am also not real sold on the pose. i am not much on looking up peoples noses.

[tonydee]

I like the composition - even the up-the-nose angle doesn't phase me - the eyes are effective in grabbing and holding the attention and strangely the reflections therein seem to be the only sharply focused things in the picture. But ultimately, it's way too blurry and soft for my taste. Must have been pretty dark in there given your EXIF - can't say you could have done any better under the circumstances - you just want to do the same under better lighting. Cheers, Tony

[TheHoff]

Too slow on the shutter; unfortunately the blurred eyes will always detract. Good shot but since the background is blown out and non-specific, you can reproduce this with better light.

[-g-]

1/30th is a bit slow for portrait work

I never noticed the shutter speed until you pointed it out. That is one of the downfalls of Av mode....

I cannot tell where the focus is, but it should be on those eyelashes but they don't look sharp to me. It could be that the low resolution is responsible for that. You should satisfy yourself that it is as sharp as it should be on the original, full resolution image.

The original is very much sharper on the eyelashes. Still, I think you are both correct that a faster shutter speed would have helped.

I agree with all of the above. I am also not real sold on the pose. i am not much on looking up peoples noses.

It wasn't a posed shot, it was a candid grab. I wasn't too happy about looking straight up into his brain and did a little clean-up of "critters". The funny thing is that my nieces, nephews and I have this thing with nose shots that we play with. If anyone leaves their camera laying around, you can be sure that somebody will grab it and leave you an up the nose shot. They even got together one year and posed the whole group (9 of them) with their heads tilted back and their nostrils flared. They mailed it to me in an unmarked envelope and I nearly peed myself laughing! :)

Must have been pretty dark in there given your EXIF

It was pretty dark and he was in the shadows to boot. The thing I don't understand is that I used the on camera flash yet as Robert pointed out it wasn't that much overexposed. I would have thought the camera would have compensated more than it did and bump the shutter speed up even a little.

Thank you everyone for all your comments!

[-g-]

Too slow on the shutter; unfortunately the blurred eyes will always detract. Good shot but since the background is blown out and non-specific, you can reproduce this with better light.

Hey there! :)

Background has been manually blurred a little. I'm thinking I should hang around my niece's house for a day and fill up a CF card. :lol: