So, I took the advice herein to heart, and have made some new shots. Wanted to do it in sunlight-it was quite difficult to achieve decent lighting, and is clearly uneven but was the best I could do. The lamp shade on the right caused for a different lighting, and I couldn't prevent it with manual wb.
But, on the the three questions.
1. Is there a particular pose that you think works best? We are leaning towards pose 5, but are open to suggestions from others with a fresher pov.
2. Brightness. At the very end I compare a quick edit, first, the brightness is upped by .67 EV, I think it looks much better, but am having a really hard time deciding if it still needs to be even brighter (1.0 or 1.3) any advice in that regard would be great, I have a really hard time figuring out the specifics of lighting.
3. Edit: I edited out the non-pregnant, the single line, and the ClearBlue. I am particularly uncertain about removing the ClearBlue, as it almost removes the essence of what we are looking at. ALSO, I can only edit in paint, I plan to print this, and that poses a problem because when I save in Paint it reduces the size by 2/3rds, going from 3.x MB to 1.04 MB. I am very concerned about the loss of size when printing an 8X10 or 11X14 to keep in our book, and am not sure the benefits of drawing attention to that is actually worth the decrease in size. Maybe there is someway to save higher quality? I will check tomorrow. But, still, I am not sure about removing the ClearBlue either.
Here are the new shots, unedited, the all need at least some brightening.
However I also don't like the little metal men. Given the personal/intimate vibe, they are intruding. Especially given how they carry the test strip, the implication is that they were deeply involved in the process and I'm not sure you want to give that impression :-)
I am also not a fan of out-of-focus bright petals in the foreground as they steal all the attention to no good cause.
Well, I do appreciate your feedback Pode, and combined it with the voting. It turned out, in fact, that my wife had always assumed we would crop out the little men. VERY disappointing to me, as I loved them, but oh well
If you have any other suggestions, or brightness advice, please feel free to toss it out, probably a couple more weeks before we announce to everyone, unless someone stumbles across this page I guess!
Anyway, thanks again for your advice, here is where we are currently at!
Also, I noticed your corrections to the edges and thought I would mention, I did have a silght angle to the camera, as I lost the top of my tripod and had to use a table, and the door on the far left was open a little...realized that after the shoot...whoops!
Also, the blue cross was fading by the time I got this shot, not as strong as the original, I really wanted to emulate the corrections you made to the blue line, or to get it like it was originally, but. After like 1 1/2 hours in MS Paint I gave up and will just have to accept it as it is. Finally, nice touch on the blurring of the flowers, I cant achieve that with Paint, but with the peripheral illumination I think it worked out fairly well?
2nd finally, holy cow about the hand man, thats wild stuff! Never seen anything like it, well done!
In Photoshop it's easy to make a selection in the size and shape of the horizontal bar, ad a fill layer that matches the selection and use the eyedropper to sample the vertical bar for the color fill of the horizontal bar. Takes perhaps five seconds. Creating the missing part of the arm was a bit of clone stamp work sampling his arm and sampling from his head to clone stamp a fist. It's a little like painting.
None of the above. The latest cropped version is best and I like that you took my suggestion to put yourself in the background for context but you are too OOF to recognize so that's a bit off putting. Also even when OOF you want to have a recognizable "mask" pattern of highlights on the face. The shot you cropped has the best lighting of the
You are over-thinking the prop aspect. Instead start by creating a nice normal flattering portrait of a couple — heads together, both full face and smiling — THEN put the test strip in the foreground for context so both wind up looking equally compelling in terms of interest. For full face poses you'll get the ideal "mask" pattern it with a centered raised key light (butterfly).
ah, very valuable lesson learned, I see what you mean. I had sortof started to get a general understanding while playing with exposure, but not nearly so well articulated. Unfortunately, it is too late to reshoot now, but I will certainly be able to use this lesson in the future. You are an excellent resource around here gardner.
