My 5 year granddaughter Samantha agreed to help me with this challenge. We had a lot of fun together doing this. Picture was straightened and cropped, then sharpened and highlighted.
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Place: 71 out of 118 Avg (all users): 5.2321 Avg (commenters): 6.1429 Avg (participants): 5.1837 Avg (non-participants): 5.2457 Views since voting: 1551 Views during voting: 408 Votes: 224 Comments: 10 Favorites: 0
First of all - welcome to the crazy world of DPC challenges.
As you've already heard from other comments - this image has potential, but there are certain technical issues with it.
Lighting: the flash is bouncing off the wall behind the girl, and it's the first thing you notice about the photo. Try bouncing the flash off the ceiling, or you can set up make-shift studio lighting by making lamp-light bounce off a piece of white cardboard. In these kinds of pictures, the light should never really be pointing directly towards the subject.
Composition: a non-centred composition tends to look more interesting. This could have been accomplished easily in post-processing by cropping off most of the right side (and a little bit of the left to balance it out). Also, I'm not sure if the phones on the bed are prominent enough. Maybe if they were all lined up in front of her?
Post-processing: I would have added a couple of additional editing steps. The whole image seems slightly too red-tinted. This can to an extent be adjusted by using the 'selective colour' function in Photoshop, then playing around with the settings for red. I also would have reduced the saturation slightly (to make the colours normal), increased the contrast a bit, sharpened the image slightly using unsharp mask, and ran it through Neat Image at a low noise reduction setting to get rid of some of the by-products of editing. But then, I'm addicted to Photoshop and have too much time on my hands...
Here's the edit:
Anyway, hope this helps.
PM me if you have any questions.
And most importantly: don't give up! Keep submitting photos, and they'll keep getting better and getter.
Awww. . .this one so warms my heart! I am disappointed that it only scored 5.2 :( I think she is so precious, and what a fairy-princess little girl's room.
From first glance I saw that the lighting is off and it looks like you were just trying to come up with something good. IMO there are too many phones. Yes it is a phone challenge but you look desperate for an idea. Just girl on the phone would have been good enough. Try bounce lighting when shooting indoors. It give it more of a natural light feel.
Nice idea, but presented through so-so execution (very much a "snap-shot"). I can barely see the phones on the bed (I have to hunt for them, which is bad, as they're supposed to be a major part of the concept), boring framing (dead-center subjects are often this way), and a slightly less than excited little girl. Good try, but I feel it falls short of its potential.
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