Faces of Dani

Went to Vegas this past weekend to visit some family. While there, I took some shots of little Dani playing outside. It was pretty bright and hot, it hit 104 degrees... Summer is here!
Please share your thoughts.

1


2


3


4

The first one is my favorite, probably because it looks more candid. Kids about this age are a joy to work with.

Marshall.

Like Clayton, the first one I find is so impressive.



Here, Dani is caught in a candid moment. The background is not distracting and we are there with you, watching this little chumkin and we're are enthralled. It's all genuine!

The others while fun are not so magnetic to draw on in and make one return. Why? I think that the very bright, uniform and saturated colors are not natural to our eyes as we developed for the past 50,000 years. There is no reference for them built into our genetic code or hard-wired animal experience.

This the bright red, blue and yellow plastics overwhelm our senses and assume importance which dwarfs any relevance of the child, who is already known to us. The red frame only serves further to distract us as it only further increases the importance of red over the soft tone Dani!

If the design of the red rectangle against the red angular slide is what you want, then its a great success, in fact I like it. Then blur the child!

Try an experiment if you like. Take the last images for example and simply convert by your favorite means to B&W. I did and found a wonderful new picture where Dani once more was the star.

Try it, you'll like it!

Asher

BTW, what's the lens details and the reason for the nice soft background.

Adorable! 1 a fav with the expression and eyes in the shot and totally in focus. 3 is cute, a tighter crop might show off the fun she is having a bit more. We want to see the peek-a-boo eye so a little less of the surrounding elements would focus the attention a bit more. Looks like a magenta cast in the second and fourth ones. If you shot RAW, easy to fix. Sometimes shade can be tricky on WB, especially is you are using Auto WB. If you shot jpeg, well color correcting jpeg files is daunting at times. Four seems a little OOF on the eyes...always the big draw. Thanks for sharing these wonderful shots!

Thank you all for the great input, I really do appreciate it!
Image 4 - My focus slipped a bit and I lost her face some. This is the one shot where my flash had not cycled fast enough and she was off to another fun experience. I had to rescue an underexposed shot and it shows.

The background in 1 is a meshed fabric pool fence. The parents have erected this as a safety measure to keep the little ones away from the pool. It did make for a nice background, also shows up a bit in 4.

I just installed CS3 and am learning to use the sliders in the RAW conversion, so any color issue is my doing. I do shoot in RAW and can go back to address those issues.

Dani's mom wanted the red border to go with a project that she was going to do, I should have posted something different on that shot, but it is what I had ready to go.
Black and white is on the list to do with Dani and I am looking forward to playing around with these shots.

Asher, the lens is my Nkon 55-200 shot at 200mm 1/250 @ f5.3.

Thanks to you three once again for the input.

Marshall

Hi, Marshall,

Marshall Everett said:

Went to Vegas this past weekend to visit some family. While there, I took some shots of little Dani playing outside. It was pretty bright and hot, it hit 104 degrees... Summer is here!
Please share your thoughts.

Click to expand...

The light play in No. 1 is just stunning! Truly a one in a million shot!

Thank you very much Doug! That one, along with the peek-a-boo eye are my favorites of the series.