Family Session Golden Hour

This one was a tough one for me. The little one was very apprehensive of my camera. After a while I just had her play in the leaves to loosen her up. After that I got them in to this pose and prayed she would stay happy. Also I was losing like fast! Talk about crunch time.

Critique welcomed

Kids are really, really tough to work with it. I give people tons of credit who do it on a regular basis.

As far as general critique, the skin tones look slightly magenta on my screen. If this is a crop, I'd leave a bit more room at the top and bottom. Not only do I think that would help the composition, but if they decide to have a print framed things are really going to get tight. The crazy hair on the kid looks cute minus the strand over her eye, but the mom's hair is begging for some cloning work.

The only other thing that jumps out to me, which I'm 100% sure the client won't ever consider, is that the color, saturation, and sharpness of the leaves feel like they are competing with the real subjects. In other words, the background seems to "pop" rather than the portrait. (super nit-picking on this ) I think you could play around with it in post and end up with an even better result.

The light in this shot looks like sunlight filtered through thin clouds. It's more concentrated from behind the subjects. To my mind that sort of defeats the idea of "magic hour" as the subjects' faces are in shadow. It looks like they may have been underexposed -- given the bright background -- and you had to increase their exposure in post-processing. It has that look. The back-lighting also gave some interesting hair highlight effects that I'm not sure the clients would favor. I agree about the magenta cast, which I suspect is also an artifact from upping the exposure of underexposed faces. There's no exif information in the file. That makes it hard to do a more thorough evaluation.

Thanks for the magenta tip Im working on PP now

That looks much better. Maybe still ever so slightly magenta, but I think you're so close that no client will ever notice it. They look like they are very fair skinned people, and if it was cool outside they may have actually been slightly pinkish at the time.

I might still try to pull back the colors a bit for the leaves. Alternatively, you could try desaturating the greens a bit and leaving the yellow/oranges alone to keep the Autumn feel. The more I look at it, the more I feel like those areas of green grass poking through on the left side of the frame are drawing the attention rather than the color of the leaves themselves.

the image in the first post has no color profile attached, so making a determination on color is a crap shoot.

I like the shot, except that the man's foot looks huge due to foreshortening, placing the leg at more of an angle across the photo might help.

Good call. I was trying to pose him not legs crossed and then my attention when to the kid. Trying to make kids happy is hard

DThriller wrote in post #17796928
Trying to make kids happy is hard

ain't that the truth.

went for a hike with my 7 year old twin boys yesterday and took as many pics as they would let me. Just sitting down to look through them now, hoping to get one or two keepers.

I feel like keeping things moving is key with family sessions. "Hey lets go over here!" "Lets sit the the leaves!" "Ooooh lets check this rock wall out!" "Lets go over here"

Yesterday we shot in 5 or 6 different locations while hiking, each shot taking just a few minutes

My tendency is to get serious and say "1,2,3 everyone smile", but that rarely if ever works, so I have to force myself to be creative in my approach. It's one reason I don't go after family portrait business.

Stress to the adults that they need to listen and stay in their pose regardless of what the kid is doing, then just wait for the kid to look normal. lol often that is the best I can do with group shots.

Yeah the parents can be worse then the kids sometimes looking annoyed and looking at the kid.

I go with the pose parents first. Then pop the kid in then try to get the kid to laugh or smile.

(I know this isnt the greatest pose)

Like for this one I set the parents up and left a spot for the kid.

overall i think that is a better pic. Except for the guy's head being tilted in a bit too much i like it. The sky is not blown out, the woman's smile seems more natural and the child's hair is not in the guy's face.

what are the chances of two subjects blinking at the same time i release the shutter? lol out of 78 pics i have two that are okay, but not even close to print worthy. Oh well, it was more about just hiking with a little testing of my new SL1 thrown in on top. Looks like i will be photoshopping faces from one pic to another.

Double blink!

Swapping faces stinks but its nessisary some times..

The only thing I would suggest it maybe increase your aperture a bit. It lists 2.8 as the f stop, and for the family shot I would have probably been at about 4 to 5.6. It would have given you a bit more depth of field as the parents seem a bit soft.
Kids are tough, I have a hard time with that as well, but just take a ton of shots and hope a few will work, even if you have to do a little face swapping.