child portrait

Just a portrait of a friend's child. It's an individual from a shoot where I tried to get three young ones to pose for a Christmas card.

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Wow, I really like it. I think the shallow DOF works very well here.

Here's another child...

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And here's the final one with all 3. Kind of a bummer I couldn't get the middle one to keep her hands out of her mouth, but she was bored, tired, and hungry, so I got what I could.

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Nice series and very colorful with all the red!!!

Dear "00"
You didn't ask for a critique but I wanted to pay you a few compliments and say to keep going in the direction you are going. First image shows a very good use of shallow DOF. If you turn the body slightly toward the camera the head will have a larger and more proportionate foundation.
Image two: Again very nice use of shallow depth of field. Note how the subject jumps away from the soft background. Additionally the background being soft does not compete with the subject. A busy background with significant contrast pulls the eye away from the subject. You did quite good here. Compliments also on the fairly low camera angle. Far too frequently, photographers stand over the subject and shoot down on them. While any rule can be broken for effect, here we see what the professional portrait photographer would do most of the time. Also the pose is pretty nice for a little boy. Natural and not excessively posed. It's very easy to over pose portrait subjects and many professionals regularly make that mistake. Third image is also well done. Posing and compostion, background control, DOF, camera angle all well handled. Note how the low camera angle compresses and shows less grass than a more elevated view would. I'm not worried about expression or little things here. The idea is that you did some very good work. Minor issues with legs coming toward the camera but for the most part you did very well and exceeded what many veteran portrait photographers do on a daily basis.
Best wishes,

Thank you very much for taking the time to critique my photos! It's easy for me to see the things I don't like about an image I take, and sometimes I don't take credit for the things that seemed to go "right".
That's the fun part about people photography, I think. The constantly changing subjects and environment are challenges when taking children's photos.

Mike

I know what you mean by getting goups of kids to pose together. I tried to get my cousin's three at the same time, not as easy as the pros make it look.. .. Sari.