My 1st First Communion Shoot

[john_valjean]

<p>Hello Everybody,<br>

First of all thanks for all your replies to my initial post when I ask for suggestions, I did get some good and some bad advice, but that's the beauty of it.<br>

I like to post some feedback on my own in case someone else would find himself or herself in the same situation I was couple of weeks ago.<br>

1. First of all, it was very hard, especially the kids never did what you asked them to do, or how to pose, you help them to strike a pose and then you take few steps back to shoot and they move or something.<br>

2. Since I was not able to move locations all the shots came from one angle sort of speak except for the ones after the church, but during the mass all the shots were taken from the same spot.<br>

3. Lighting was a challenge since in some areas it is an intensity/color and in other areas it is a different intensity/color<br>

4. Things happen too fast so if you miss the first "good" shot on one kid, you can't recover.<br>

5. I ended up doing a lot of post processing to fix the white balance, to crop and to add some light to the pictures.<br>

6. I was lucky to have a friend let me borrow his camera (5d m2) with the package lens and on my xti i put the 50mm f1.8, so between the 2 I took about 200 pictures total and I have about 120 that I gave to the parents. Not a great hit rate, but again I am not a professional.<br>

7. Next time I would definitely charge some money, since it took me about 2 hours in church for the shoot and about 4 hours at home to work on the pictures.<br>

8. I am posting some pictures just to show you a bit of what I ended up with. <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/32838515@N02/" target="_blank">http://www.flickr.com/photos/32838515@N02/</a><br>

9. Again thanks for your suggestions and I hope this post would help someone else.</p>

[savagesax]

<p>Based on the 3 images posted they all are a bit under exposed, based on my monitor, which is calibrated using Spyder Pro. The color tones on the faces are a bit red, but that is probably due to the images slightly under exposed. For your first communion shoot, you got the job done well.</p>

[kiva]

<p>I can see only 3 images; not able to see the metadata either to see if you took advantage of the 5dm2 and it's great ISO (safe to go to 6400 iso from what I've read). </p>

<p>The images appear to be underexposed a bit and could be improved there for starters.</p>

<p>Children, many times, need to be captured with photojournalistic intent. Some are just to active to sit still and listen to a stranger with a camera unless you solicit the aid of the parent to get some compliance but even then you may not get a smile. Just shoot candid and get them laughing and smiling. </p>

<p>I enjoy seeing your photos that have the on-looking crowd of people watching the process.</p>