Critique Required new born shoot need opinions to confirm something

[adam hoskins]

think i prefer the natural look more without the skin being over edited plus i think it gives a dead appearance for the baby on the towels. second shot with clock dont think this works as i wanted the baby to be asleep really as the shot looks to unnatural, although it is odd i think the bw works better but am really split on this tbh , i was trying something a bit different so it was only a test. but be honest and slate if its not your cup o tea

 

[Lesley Jones]

First of all, I know nothing about babies in real life. Secondly, I used to edit for NILMDTS and I have worked on literally dozens and dozens of baby pictures. Very rarely I got to edit living babies because I was fairly good at removing all the tubes. I will say be careful posing them on colourful towels. I did a session once with a living baby, but next to a bright yellow cushion. It was great for accent colour for the photograph, but I had the most awful job removing the reflected colour on the skin. You don't seem to have that problem here, but I find the vignette too strong and the processing rather over done.

I won't go into details, but I am not familiar with undamaged skin, rather I had to resort to heavy use of Portraiture and all sorts of trickery. Virtually all images were in black and white for obvious reasons - I found the coffee toner in Silver Efex was quite nice with the little ones too. I love the idea with the clock, but perhaps the expression is a bit fierce. I think you know exactly how you wanted it to look, but they don't always co-operate, do they?

Take my comments with a pinch of salt because my experience with living babies is very limited. There are a lot of fathers in here who will be able to give you much better advice