Two little boys reflecting

banehawi (Critique Team)

8

5 Nov 2012 - 5:00 PM

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Its a beautiful moment with the two kids unaware of the camera. It works well with the reflection visible.

If you want to tweak it, the kids faces are a little too bright, and while this is addressed, it will also reduce the glare coming from the water, and the gravel path, and give everything a little more detail.

I would crop some space from the bottom to remove the bits of grass, and just a little off the right to move the kids a little off centre.


I used the highlight tool in Photoshop CS to do this.


Ive done this in mod1. Sometimes, shots where direction subjects are looking is to the left, flipping the shot horizontally, as in mod2 can give a completely different feel to the shot, though its not how it was at the time.


Hope this helps,


Regards


Willie

Constructive Critique!

alistairfarrugia (Critique Team)

5 Nov 2012 - 11:19 PM

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Willie addressed the issues I was going to raise. Before reading other people's critique, I take my time to sample some thoughts myself, but most of the stuff I came up with were already pointed out.

As already mentioned, the highlights needed to be kept in check as the some areas of the face and neck are close to being burnt out - adjust this if you have the RAW file (shows JPEG in EXIF). Also, the crop is to "in the centre" for my liking - I'd crop to give the impression of negative space in the direction the children are looking - might also use content-aware fill to add some more space if the original picture wasn't larger. I think Photoshop would tackle that very easily.

Also, I think you could have used a slightly faster shutter speed and a wider aperture (say f/5.6 maybe) to try to get that grass to be blurred out and better isolate the kids and the reflection - though to be honest I don't know whether a shallower depth of field would end up blurring parts of the reflection.

Finally, I think this is crying for a B/W conversion - you might lose the red-hair (which leaves an impact) but you'll also get rid of the red-shirt that is vying for attention. I'll try to do a mod myself now and see where that takes me...

Constructive Critique!