Piano Recital

Nice shot! I love how you captured that moment and the expression on your sons' face is great! We all can relate to that.
It is nice to see a "real life" moment shot. We can only shoot so many pictures of flowers, fire hydrants, dragonflies, buildings at night, etc. before we all cry ENOUGH!!
Thanks for sharing this! Hope to see more soon.

Dave

Thanks,

I think that unless I am able to capture an "ansel adams" moment, most of my outdoor shots are pretty lacking. I don't go very many interesting places.

I find taking action shots with the G1 to be very challenging. I recently shot a volleyball game at our company picnic. That was quite challenging. I found that if I dropped from raw, to jpeg, and used continous shoot mode, and just "followed the ball" I got quite a few good shots.

Mike

Lovely photo -- much better than a fire hydrant.

I would like to make a couple of small suggestions:

Sharpening: I used 80%, 0.4, 0 in Photoshop and it enhanced the photo (for my eyes).

Cropping: I seem to spend most of my enhancing time on cropping photos. Since you've got such a good photo to work with, you might try cropping just a bit off the left -- either cut the leftmost banister in half vertically to act as a border, or go farther right and cut the next one in half. Tends to focus on your son more and gives you a definite edge to the photo (less noise). On the top, try trimming it down a bit to eliminate that rightmost white space above the piano. Again, it's one less distration from your main subject.

Whether you try the suggestions or not, it's a great photo.

Great picture Mike, please let me know how you set your flash. Bounce? Card?

Criticism... None realy. Great pic you should be proud of it as well as your handsome son. If it were my shot, the only thing I would do is get rid of flash reflection on handrail a few inches behind his right ear and possibly tone down the color on the red button under the piano. Both things draw my eye away from the subject.

Paul

Good feedback all of you. I'm going to re-crop and adopt some of the suggestions. I'm also going to try applying a sharpening filter using an edge selection mask. The theory being if we sharpen the edges, and not the smooth areas, the picture looks better. Its not that this picture really needs it (not much noise), but I've been itching to learn the technique, and when you have a hammer, everything is a nail.

I'll post the results later today.

Mike

Here are the results of the different cropping and sharpening. The sharpening was a pain in the patush. I created an edge mask layer, gausian blurred it, loaded it into a selection, inverted the selection, and then sharpened using 80 .4 0. I also applied a despeckle with the inverse of the edge selection.

Overall, I like the results. Let me know what you think. If people are interested, I can post the detailed step/by/step for the photoshop process. This image doesn't really have much noise. I should do this with another picture that has lots of noise.

There are some noticeable differences.

1) Color is different. Unfortunately my memory doesn't let me recall the exact color of the original shot. There is more yellow in the first version, more red in the second.

2) The first one looks "oversharpened" now that I look at the second one. Perhaps I should have turned up the sharpening a bit in the second picture.

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I took the suggestions. (let me know how it looks).

Also, this was an old victorian building (formerly a house, now a "home"). Nice high ceilings, but not too high. Great for bouncing flashes off of them. I used no other lighting.

Mike

I like the color tone of the original, but the new one is good too. The flash bounce off of the hand rail is not distracting, and the red button is muted. I am flattered that you made the changes. I liked the original crop, but you have tightened the subject nicely in the new one.

When you crop, do you keep the H*W ratio specific to a printing application, or do you crop for subject only. I wonder because I am about to print a photo and the frame I am going to place the pic in is about to help me crop...

PJ

BTW, I wouldn't mind a photoshop tutorial on your techniques. I have been snapping pics for a long time, but photoshop is pretty new to me.

PJ