Shots of my boys, OCF, C&C please

The wife and I wanted to do our Xmas card photos and getting the boys to sit together and not go crazy is very difficult. But none the less, I managed to get three individual shots that we were able to use.

I shot these with my 20d, RF-602's, 1 YN-460 off camera right at about 3/4 power. SS speed was 1/250th, iso 800. I probably could have gone with a lower iso. Will have to play some more with settings before the next shoot.

A couple of things I noticed and will mention above each photo. A couple of common sense things after analyzing the photos. The wife is happy with how the card turned out so that makes like easier for me.

Let me know what you think of these three:

1. Table running through his body is something I should have picked up on.

First, great looking kids! Also, if Mom's happy, that's half the battle, right?

First C&C - find a different background or at least move them farther away from it. You don't say what aperture you shot, but if possible try to blur the background more by opening the aperture. The greenery and the decorations will still look good if they are less sharp. You already know about the table through their head and necks.

2nd - the shadow behind him in the 2nd looks sharper/stronger than the other two - those are OK but the shadow in the 2nd is a bit distracting. It would be nice if that was more consistent.

Last point - in the 3rd shot, he has a christmas light growing from his head

i would certainly separate them from the background a bit, and bounce the flash, or use a modifier, seems way too harsh

I shot these all at f8.

You are correct about moving them from the background. More separation is needed.

When I bounced the light, the foyer of my house was eating up all the light. And I simply did not have time to break out another light source. Maybe shooting at a larger aperture next time as well.

Thanks for the feedback.

The feedback here is all very good. Flash is too close to your subject making a fairly hard shadow line. Subject is too close to the background and too much DOF.

For a single subject such as this, you really don't need a 2nd light. Just shoot it with one. Put the flash at 45% off the subject and above them angled down 30% or so. If you still get a deep shadow on the other side then use a reflector. You don't need anything fancy. A piece of foam core board or one of those "sun shield" things that go inside your car window during the summertime.

-Charles

Yeah, I definitely need some type of reflector to help and I'll try all of the suggestions here. Thank you all for the feedback. It is appreciated.

Scott

If you're using a single hot-shoe flash and have a nice white ceiling, I love the Lumiquest ProMax 80/20. It's cheap and will get rid of the hard shadow. Backing away from the background and opening the aperture will help too, as others have said.

Nice start. Like others said move them away from bg. Use f2.8 or even faster. That will need much less power from your flash and make bg much better. Bounce the flash to get more directional light.