Second Family Shoot - CC Please!

This is my second family shoot I have ever done and I think I have improved a lot through this practice (been doing free shoots for friends). I am a stay at home mom who is loving photography and would love to make a little money to support this hobby as well as make ends meet a little better. Let me know what you think and if I seem close to be able to charge for shoots. Thanks in advance everyone!

Here are the first two - will put two more in the next post.

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And a couple more...

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I really like that 3rd picture! Beautiful eyes...

Nicely framed and cropped but be careful of backgrounds. The 2nd set has much better backgrounds than the 1st set even with good DOF blurring them out. The cropping could be better in the 2nd set however (the man's hand could be cloned out)
You did great with the eyes of the little one and I also like your poses.

A never ending learning experience....whites look a little blown out...maybe slightly over exposed...

Lovely looking family and you did a good job with them.

I agree with the comment above about the BG for the first two. The third is a terrific shot with good expression/eye contact - and what terrific eyes.

There looks to be some color shifts in the set - did you shoot a white balance to start? Or at least set an appropriate white balance?

Thanks for the comments so far. With the first set, the background was something I noticed in the middle of the pose, but with cropping I made it look better than it did in RAW. I certainly learned this during the shoot though.

As far as the exposure, that was done is PP, so I will tone it down a little.

And the white balance was set on daylight on my camera, but I messed around with it in PP - taking out some yellow and adding some blue to try to get the skin tones where I wanted it. This family all had different skin tones (red, green, and white/yellow) so it was tough to get their tones to look good together.

Thanks again for the CC - any other input?

nice pics...the background of the first set look little crooked.

Great series of photos.

The crooked background was done on purpose (on the first photo)...not a good "artistic" addition? Or does this just vary a lot according to people's taste? I have always liked a tilted background once in a while in pics, but certainly not in a lot of them...just nice for a change I guess. Still trying to figure things like that out...

kendi4 wrote in post #11342049
The crooked background was done on purpose (on the first photo)...not a good "artistic" addition? Or does this just vary a lot according to people's taste? I have always liked a tilted background once in a while in pics, but certainly not in a lot of them...just nice for a change I guess. Still trying to figure things like that out...

All of them are leaning to the right. Occasionally doing this intentionally is fine, but I see a trend in your shooting that you might want to be conscious of going forward.

The content of the shots are fine. Nice color and sharpness. Just feel seasick looking at them.

in the last image, the faces all look to be a different color. the man has a yellowish cast, the woman has magenta, and the baby looks cyan. below is my color edit. (side note, his sweater collar is crooked, but that's much harder to fix in post)

SJPHoto wrote in post #11342619
in the last image, the faces all look to be a different color. the man has a yellowish cast, the woman has magenta, and the baby looks cyan. below is my color edit. (side note, his sweater collar is crooked, but that's much harder to fix in post)

edited: color in faces, levels, skin, saturation, removed some red, burn, contour shadow around faces, color brush faces and hair.

Wow, you really did a great edit there, thanks! So I have Aperture 3 for editing and couldn't figure out how to get the faces all similar colors as I noticed the color tone differences too - the RAW image is much more noticeable. I am sure you have Photoshop, but can you explain a little further how you did that? Also, I love what you did to their hair...I gotta figure out how to do that on Aperture too. Thanks again!


Oh, and to the poster who said that my pics all tilt to the right, you are very correct on that and I hadn't noticed that before - I will be more conscious of this, thanks!

Kendi:

the best recent cash I've spent has been on a WhiBal card. Stick it in front of your camera at arms length, shoot, save image. Do you outdoor shooting. During post processing, refer back to the whibal card shot, record white balance from that, apply to all others taken in similar light.

Instant perfect, (and consistent!) WB 99+% of the time! Only disclaimer is if the light changes dramatically, you'd have to reshoot the WB card. In a situation like your recent family shoot, (nice job, BTW. I'm sure the customers are satisfied with what you delivered!) you're probably only out there for an hour shoot so chances are good one whibal card shot would be necessary.

dave

I'm not really familiar with Aperture and it's uses... but I personally use Lightroom and Photoshop CS4. In Photoshop, to select the faces you can use the lasso tool or the circle marquee. Depending on the file size, you want to feather it. In the case of your image size, I used a circle marquee at about 50 pixles and changed the colors via color balance and color levels. I also used the color brush for around dad's eyes, those were yellowish for me and for mom's hair/roots, also color brush. There was lots of other things that I did, but that allowed for correcting the largest problems. I spent about 2 mins editing the image.

This may all sound like a foreign language to you if you don't have PS, but I hope it helps some. Try it out and if you have more questions, feel free to ask!