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Originally Posted by tsearcher
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Potaits aren't really my thing, but since nobody ese has stepped in, I'll offer this.
First pic:
Nice shallow depth of field (f/1.8 or f/2?). Good focus on the eye. The ear is nicely out of focus. Good separation from background. Good exposure/lighting.
What's with the kid's right eye? Is he just winking, or does he have an empty eye socket? The L-R positioning and cropping seems to be arbitrary unless you actually want this picture to be about the mystery of his unseen eye. The wrinkles about that eye impart a sense of anger.
If you don't want this picture to be about that eye, adjust your left-side cropping in either direction. If he wasn't winking and had a normal right eye, I'd suggest that the crop should be moved to the left just a bit (out of current frame*) because the current crop cuts a little bit off the right side of his nose. The idea is to avoid amputating body part at arbitrary locations, especially close to their natural ends. If you are going to amputate, make it clear that it isn't just a sloppy job of framing that just missed. Bottom crop is good. Top and right crops can be somewhat arbitrary, dictated by frame ratios and element placement. Current frame is almost 3:2.
Since the wink / empty socket distracts, for this shot I'd suggest moving the left crop a bit to the right, so as to slice through his nostril and avoid almost all of his right eye. The most important element of the picture is his left eye. The second most important element is his nose. Try to position the eye in a balanced spot, like 1/3 in from top and left edges, or at the golden ratio intersection. Keep the bottom of the frame where it is, so you get the bottom of the nose. Do this positioning in post-processing. You shouldn't be overly precsise about framing when taking the shot.
*When taking pictures of people, frame loosely, and then crop in post. This allows you to play around with various options for copping your shot.
Second Pic
What's the story here? If this shot is exactly as you wanted it, you're going to have to explain it to me.
The focus seems to be on the front of the hand (not even the ring is in focus). Unless this was totally deliberate, I'd guess this was a result of having the camera set to focus on closest object. Depending on what you are trying to say with this picture, the focus should be on the woman's right eye or on the ring, and there should be more DOF. IOW, I think you used the wrong aperture and didn't select your focus point or method well.
There's just too much stuff out of focus, (with the front of the hand being just in focus) for this to be a good picture. Either put everything out of focus, or (better) give us some element to focus on.
Perhaps in part because of the focus problem, the face seems washed out. This could be because you used matrix metering, and the dark furniture caused an increased exposure. For a shot with high contrast between intended subject and surrounding elements, spot meter your intended focus point.
I have no problem with the pose, but be aware that if you try to get both her face and the ring in focus by decreasing aperture, you might pull too much detail out of the background. The thing to try for having both in focus, might be to focus on the eye, then manually adjust focus to be on the ring, and then readjust focus back about half way. Then take a few shots to bracket DOF.
I'm not sure how good this would look with the face in focus and the ring out of focus.
I think there is a bit too much dead space on the right. Perhaps change the aspect ratio from 3:2 to 7:5.
If you are going to have the ring in focus and the face out of focus, I think you have to lose the right-hand half of the frame: shoot vertically.
Two Plus Two
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