Untitled

Kodak ISO 400 35mm film, Nikkor 50mm, f/1.8, Nikon F75...

... Thnaks for your comments

Good job. Let's get down to critique. I try to leave some "sustains" and "improves" for everybody.

To sustain: Good body position. This is a photo capturing a gesture. We can see that the child is directing attention to the television, and thinking about it, while fidgeting some; children do this; I think the photo captures that moment.

Good use of DOF; we can see a television, but what is on the screen in unimportant. One other note here about the television screen; good job on that because I remember as a youngster trying to take pictures of a television where the frame rate of the TV interfered with the appearance of the screen image in the photo; I think the screen image here looks as it needs to be.

Good presentation of shadows on the floor. The shadows and the tile design communicate perspective and depth.

To improve: some of the background area, around the chair, is a little distracting. I think this may have been the by-product of just being in the environment during a candid capture. Pay attention to those backgrounds. Of course, I think you could engineer or assemble a studio-type setup to capture children playing in their environment. A simple backdrop curtain on a far side of the play area or pre-positioned strobes to illuminate the area around the child could improve the appearance overall.

Seems as though there may have been some fill flash or light source directed toward the child during the photo; good that it didn't overwhelm the shadows on the floor, but the shadow between the arm and back, subject's right, is a little harsh. Also, because I can see wrinkles in the drapery of the shirt in that shadow, but not in the back overall, I think some fabric details may have been lost.

Again, some of the problems with candid capture. To improve the photo, I think you would have to pre-plan a setup for photography that the child could play in. Overall, good job. Hand gesture tells the story here. Maybe for a follow-up print or post-process, an enlargement or crop of the hands might be a good choice. Good luck. J.

Thank you very much Sirkarji and John for your comments.

John, your suggestions are really good. But I would clarify some points here that, I didn't use any flash or artificial light here, the light is very natural coming from back open area door of house, I would also add that I usually don't use flashes and don't like to use those, this all happened because of my favorite 50mm 1.8 lens with ISO 400film. This low but natural lighting was inspiring me to take this picture so I clicked i and results were nice to me. I like very much your point about TV, yes TV screens are really challenging for capturing, and many digital systems fail here.

Here is the cropped hands:

Very nice image! Thanks for your photo and new-year-wishes!

Wish you a Blessed new Year 2009 too!