henry's 19 months today-a really fun kid-i'd love to get my fellow photographers' take on them-what you like, what you don't, what you'd change and why-my skin's thick enough, i figure-whether it's for a job or just for myself, i want to keep moving forward as a photographer and i always love input from my FM friends
Edit: forgot to mention that my inspiration and concept for #2 came from Gabe-not my original idea-i'm big on giving credit lately as a friend of mine has had a number of his concepts used without credit...and i don't wanna be that guy
You singled out the #2 image in your introduction.
My comments below are offered in a friendly tone of voice and are about that image specifically:
1. The boy has no ears
2. The boy has no hands.
My Simple Suggestion: A photo can be made of a subject with a white background (even backlit with a window with bright light) that does not require losing parts of the face or figure.
Suggestion #2: It is very easy to rotate a camera so that the image frame is "vertical" and can then include more of the figure (e.g. hands).
Finally...he is cute and looks like he would be a great subject to photograph.
bryanlindsey wrote:
#1 is fantastic! Mesmerizing eyes...
Not a big fan of the two blown-out shots. Just my own subjective opinion.
bryan, thanks for adding your thoughts-would you mind telling me why you don't like them? i love to "get in the head" of other photogs to understand their perspectives-thanks
Steady, thanks for adding your perspective-my focus on #2 was unintentional, just wanted to credit the inspiration for that shot-it's very nontraditional, but glad to get feedback from my peers
MSC, thanks for the feedback-very much appreciated
I don't know quite how to explain it. Maybe it's the subject matter - it doesn't seem natural to have this light exploding around a kid. If it was a punk rocker jumping up with his guitar or some other big action shot maybe it would be different. Just strikes me as a close-encounters-of-the-third-kind experience. Difficult to put a feeling into words sometimes...
PURELY my own subjective opinion. If you and the subject (or in this case, the subject's other close family members) like it, then you've made a good photo.
On 1, I don't think his ear or the hat need to be so oof. The function of blurring the background is to help create separation of the subject from the background and make details in the bg less distracting. In this case, I found the extremely blurred ear and the hat a little distracting. Very nicely lit, though, and I like the b&w treatment.
Daniel, I think most people here enjoy crediting the source of their inspirations when it's clear what the source is. The concept of back-light eating away the edges of a form or figure has been around a long time. I saw examples of it with nudes a few years ago on FM. Very few photographers can claim that any concept they use originated with them. Hanson Fong is quick to make this disclaimer about his own work. We assimilate so many different concepts and techniques and images from so many sources that it's easy to get them muddled together and forget where the inspiration for a creation came from, if the inspiration even had a single source. I like to think the post I made titled, "How to Light a Kiss", provided a concept that I have seen incorporated by a lot of people on this forum, whereas I didn't see it used here at all before my post. However, I got the idea from a movie, after studying every kiss scene I came across in stills and movies for a couple of years, looking for what I thought worked best. That's not to say that everyone that incorporated that lighting into their kiss images saw my post. Some may have gotten it from someone else's post who saw my post. Maybe some were studying it the same way I was and they saw the same movie. We absorb all we can from every media source. In many cases it would be hard to credit the source of ideas we use and in most cases, we're seeing several examples of the idea from multiple sources. I don't think anyone here is intends to slight their fellow inspirators. If I ever do anything as distinctively derivative as posing a wedding party on fruit picking ladders, I'll get a kick out of crediting Sam. That said, I saw someone posing a family on a ladder in a house under construction a couple of years ago in the people forum.
thanks for the explanation, bryan-point taken-some techniques are not universal, that's for sure-appreciate it, man
brian-shot this at f/2.2 on 135L at close range, if i remember my settings-the shallow DOF was a product of that only rather than intentionally throwing parts of the face OOF-appreciate your thoughts-i love shooting wide open but am starting to gradually move to stopping down a little where appropriate-it's food for thought...thanks
Thanks for considering my criticism, Daniel. I hope you understand that I think it's a lovely portrait. The blur I commented on is something I'd have to try and look at both ways to be sure about it. I'm pretty sure, though.
