Portrait in the woods

[AndyB1975]

My first picture on here is a recent impromptu portrait of my son in the woods. I was really just wandering around testing my new 70-300 Tamron lens and the light and scene were perfect for a few minutes. I think by using the zoom it's pulled the background in quite nicely too. It could be a bit sharper and the focus wasn't perfect but I was quite pleased with the result.

F4.2
1/320 sec
116mm

Comments and critism most welcome.

[Colin Southern]

Hi Andy,

I like it, but I think that all the space above your son's head competes too much for the eyes attention. So I've given it a crop - slight vignette - sharpen ... what do you think?

[Daisy Mae]

Andy...it really is smashing.

Great light, great model.....if that's an early shot then I can't wait to see more.

[Donald]

Like Sharon says - If that's the first one, then I look froward to seeing what comes in the future.

That lens is nicely throwing the background out of focus. I hope Colin's post is helpful. He knows quite a bit does our Mr Southern, part of which is how to make a good portrait. It's the sort of advice and guidance you'd pay a lot of money for if you went on a course.

[AndyB1975]

Thanks for the kind comments

Colin, thank you very much, you have transformed my picture to make it look great, thats very much appreciated. Processing the picture is an area that I really need to learn more about so my next step in this photography journey is to move away from jpeg's, start shooting in RAW and nail the processing (that all sounds so easy when you type it!)

Thanks again

Andy

[Donald]

(that all sounds so easy when you type it!)

It does, Andy, but it is very much is about the application of the 'one-step-at-a-time' principle. I think most, if not all of us, knew that applying that principle is what we were meant to do, but once you get into it, you realise there's that other bit you want to learn and you'll come back to the thing you're trying to learn at the moment. You end up half-knowing both bits.

Then you get totally frustrated by all this stupid post-processing nonsense and become convinced that the people who know how to do it must all be geeks and need to get a real life because 'normal' people like you and me don't have the time to waste on all this nonsense and why do cameras have the facility to shoot JPG and make image-making easy, if you're not meant to use it and why did you waste money on all this stupid photography stuff anyway.

Once you start feeling like that, you know you're getting into it and starting to learn. And just keep reminding yourself that everyone else on here who talks knowingly about post-processing has been along the same route. So, stick with it.