First few days as a photographer

What do you all think of this picture of my son. I am just learning, so any opinions, good or bad, are welcomed. I've noticed the sharpness of the imaging has gotten worse since I had to resize it and get it under the 150kb limit.

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Hello and welcome to POTN - it's a nice place to meet some interesting folks and learn a lot of stuff.

You have a cute young man, and I like that natural look. That being said his face is about 2-stops underexposed with a lack of contrast and both those factors will contribute to apparent lack of sharpness. Your focus is also quite close, so the DOF is very shallow contributing more to overall softness. Give use your camera settings for this shot and we can make some constructive suggestions. - Stu

Like you mentioned, I think the quality is suffering from resizing. How are you resizing your images?

Other than that, lovely photo! I think the tight composition works well and the contrast of shadows and highlights work well here. Keep shooting!

This was shot with my 50mm lense f/2.2 ISO800 and 1/400. I was working in my in-laws house and the lighting wasn't the greatest. Was there better settings I could have used?

I resized through GIMP. Shrank the image to 1024 x 1024 and lowered the quality while saving to .jpeg from 97% to 85% to get the right file size.

What camera are you shooting with? Regardless, lower ISOs, in short, would have given you better quality in terms of contrast, noise, etc. The difference is more noticeable in intro level DSLRs. So unless your kid is extremely fast, you could've lowered your ISO to 200 and shot at 1/100.

OK, makes sense. Im using a T2I.

It looks as though you may have metered on the bright spot behind him, rather than his face, which makes his face / expression (obviously) shadowed. This would be a great snapshot, but the face just isn't exposed. You've got an eye for framing, but I'd go ahead and pull out a bit more and have more of his head in the image.

Overall, not bad, could have been really nice with proper exposure.

The original image was lighter. I went to fix the eye booger and bumped up the contrast, maybe too much. Here is the original image, untouched.

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Sam Ryu wrote in post #11163504
What camera are you shooting with? Regardless, lower ISOs, in short, would have given you better quality in terms of contrast, noise, etc. The difference is more noticeable in intro level DSLRs. So unless your kid is extremely fast, you could've lowered your ISO to 200 and shot at 1/100.

Noise is not the issue here, and I agree with crows that his meter may have been "fooled" by the bright area, causing the shadowed portion of face to go even darker. The timing and composition are very good, and the shot just suffers from simple technical exposure issues. You could have kept it at ISO 800 - not a bad choice at all - halved the shutter speed to 1/200 sec and gained an entire stop of exposure which would have helped the face.

Welcome to POTN!
One thing that works for shallow depth of field is to have the eye CLOSEST to the camera in focus.
I will give it a shot...

Is there any post processing that can fix these issues or is it to late? If anything can be more confusing than photography itself, its learning the software.

My take

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mwilleman wrote in post #11163974
Is there any post processing that can fix these issues or is it to late? If anything can be more confusing than photography itself, its learning the software.

Even though the shot is 1-2 stops underexposed for the face, you may have a bit of leeway to correct that area. Here is my post processing attempt:

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I like how his face has lightned up a bit and looks softer. Does the light in the original photo take away from the image?