Three of them look like someone lopped off the tops of their heads with a machete. Bad framing, IMO, as I can’t imagine somebody thinking a crop like that looks good.
So should they be judged as 4 individual photos, or as a collage? The bottom right photo is smaller than the top left, juts out to the right and it isn’t aligned to the bottom left photo. The left black border is much thicker than the top, right or bottom.
Individual photos. And this morning I realized that, as displayed in frame, two of them are actually cropped quite differently.
Anyway, I was just probing. Thanks for the responses.
I am confused by these comments. I am not at all handy with a camera, but still, I have always heard that a close up portrait should have parts cropped off–giving a sense of energy and intimacy. On examination of portraits, this seems an accurate rule of thumb to me (not to be followed slavishly of course). So are you guys saying this isn’t a universally agreed upon idea?
What you say is true. Look at some examples of fine portrait work and there is a measure of cropping involved. But in the pics you displayed in part because of the cropping, more what was cropped then was not, and because my eyes are not drawn to the subject they are on 1-10 scale, a 5. More to point, my eyes scan for what is not there instead of what is and that makes the subjects forgettable except for top left. My eyes are drawn to his, pretty good use of shadow though the cropping again fails to totally invite me in.
No. No matter where Frylock posts them you have to download them to see them.
You know what he means.
I quite like the two pics on the left. At the small size they’re shown at, it looks like the eyes are sharply focused and have nice catchlights. The top right is OK as a snapshot but probably not the most flattering angle. And the bottom right one I don’t like at all. There’s no light in the eyes and it looks soft overall.
I’m sorry to say that I don’t like the photos a lot - and I don’t think they’re very good to be honest. I think the deep blacks are too deep on their faces and you lose a lot of detail. The lower right shot especially, on my monitor you can’t see half her face aside from a bright spot on her cheek. As a result, the eye I can see looks odd. The upper left child has black hair and would benefit from a soft backlight or other lightsource in order to bring out his face that’s falling away into blackness as well. I want to see more of that half of his face but can’t. The upper right baby has a weird floating mask effect from being unable to see his ear and the deep shadows under his cheeks. The lower left is definitely the most engaging. The shadows aren’t too dark to obscure the parts we like to look at. The cropping on the right two photographs feels awkward. Try some non-centered shots (actually I can’t tell if the lower right shot is centered, sorry) The lower left one is the best of the set, definitely. The upper left could have been the best if I could see him better. The posing is very good for him. Capturing a quirky smile on the lower left photo is very nice. And why not try shaking it up with some dark grey or textured backgrounds so you can see the outline of their faces? (Don’t photoshop it in please, that usually looks fake)
The final word is, if I hired a photographer to take photos in the black-and-white vein of my children, I would not be happy with these and would want a different photographer or another set of photographs taken (that choice simply depends on business attitude of the photographer when faced with someone not liking the work).
(Yes, I am an artist. An illustrator and designer though, not a photographer. So take it with a grain of salt.)
I agree that lower left is best. I also am not as big a fan of the two older kids’ pictures as of the two infants’ pictures. (Awkward pose on upper left, lower right too dark on the left side of the picture.)
I have not been able to understand criticisms of the upper right one. No ear? I see it… it’s right there. I’m not sure what to make of this. I mean, it’s a little faint, but it’s right there. Face angled? Well, yeah, I see kind of a leaned-back laugh starting. Seems completely natural and endearing to me. The forehead cropping? This appears to me to be standard operating procedure so again I don’t know what you guys mean by that.
Part of this could have to do with my familiarity with the subjects. (They’re my kids of course.) For reasons difficult to articulate, each one seems to me to capture the relevant kids’ personality in a particularly poignant way. But of course you can’t have access to that information, so it’s not really relevant.
Are you trying for artsy or for portraiture? You can crop without making it look like The Lopper is back in town.
I think they are a step above the average family portrait. I am not qualified to judge them from the standpoint of a professional photographer, but I certainly think they are appealing photos and I would be very happy to display them in my home if they were my kids.
Also: The kid in the upper left totally looks like a young Michael Fishman (that kid who played DJ on the sitcom Roseanne). If you were trying to get him work as DJ in a new movie based on Roseanne, you could definitely use this photo as his “headshot” when you try to get him an agent.
Yes, and it was a very ignorant statement. You aren’t practicing safe internet by not downloading a JPEG. Letting the guy know that he downloaded the same file either way is a way of fighting his ignorance.
Clicking on it to download is slightly more dangerous. It might actually run Flash or JavaScript. You might end up downloading another file by using JavaScript to give a fake mouseover link.
I think you hit every single point I was going to make, including the bottom left being the best of the bunch.
For an amateur, I think it’s pretty good. It shows me the eye of somebody who is exploring and playing around with lighting. The biggest problems for me are the composition and the overly contrasty lighting. Now, I like low-key photography, but when parts of the head completely get lost in black it starts to look weird (like the kid in the upper left especially.) But the bottom left shot I think is a solid shot overall.
They’re good photos in that they’re not just straight snapshots in normal light, with no use of a light source, or use of shadows, and not just using standard over saturated automatic colour settings. They are sharp enough on the eyes, don’t have a lot of background clutter, and have good eye contact, low noise, and good lens choice ie no odd distortion from using too wide an angle or weird depth of field effects etc.
If you know the children as well, they will also have more impact. For a beginner I’d say they are very good in that some work has been done to achieve the shot. For someone who had done a bit of study whether an amateur or not, they are pretty easy to achieve with modern cameras, and the focus would be more on a better use of shadow, and facial expression, cropping etc.
Otara
The lower left on is good- the kid looks cute and engaging. That’s not to say it’s not a touch creepy- it is. But I think that slightly-creepy undertone works in a “beauty and absurdity of everyday life” kind of way. I like it (although I just noticed the missing ear- it is off-putting and asymmetrical.)
The baby is my least favorite, on technical grounds. Without some kind of definition from the background, he looks like a creepy disembodied mask, and once you see it that way, you can’t unsee the mask effect. The rest of the lighting is good. The expression is a little bland and doesn’t really capture much, but it is a bit of expressiveness and we all know babies are tough subject.
But the photo desperately needs some way to make the baby pop from the background a bit, especially as his clothing is so well lit. The lighting you have kind of makes sense for a dramatic silhouette, but you want dramatic semi-silhouette from chiseled models with dramatic features, not babies. And even then, you have to stay consistent with the dramatic lighting, rather than having 80% of the face lit like a standard portrait and 20% just completely lost in shadow. As it is, it looks like the photographer was trying for something and just didn’t quite get it.
The girl on the bottom right is my least favorite in terms of expression. I’m sure she is a cute kid, but in this photo she has a non-expression, and none of her personality comes through. Is she smart? playful? serious? lighthearted? spoiled? I have no clue. It looks like she was asked to stop in front of the camera for a moment, and she blandly complied. She needs a facial expression (and again, some lighting to make her pop from the background and let us see some of her other eye.)
The kid on the top left has the start of an interesting expressions/engagement with the camera, and the lighting is good save the hair. Just a tiny bit of light to pop out the hair from the back, and it could be a perfectly serviceable photo.
My advice? Do a google image search of “low key lighting” and “low key lighting child.” You’ll see that people mostly use this to display the sculptural aspects of the human body. With babies, this means they are lit in a soft, fairly bright way that emphasizes their roundness and compactness. With kids, it’s really all about the facial expression, and the whole effect is going to be toned down than what you’d use to capture, say, an adult athlete. As always take LOTS of photos and get really good at pulling the expressions out of the kids. Watch some America’s Top Model to understand how models hard models work to play to the camera to create compelling photos, and get ideas for how to tease that out of your own models. Finally, always be ready to toss out your best shot. Public feedback like this is good- you are often too wrapped up in the magic of the camera to really see what others are seeing.
I think some perspective is in order here. If they were taken with a forward flash attached to the camera then they’re actually pretty good. I would guess that it’s a fairly new camera and not a first generation DSLR. the shading is pretty good for flash.
They weren’t. Not as the primary light source, at any rate.
OK, for some strange reason I thought I read this.