Picturing the Other

This is my first attempt at the Picturing the Other assignment. The above is a photo of Willy. I met Willy today on the playground at Lithia Park, and asked his dad if I might take his photo. He was a very cheerful, but somewhat shy subject. His dad tried to get him to smile, but I think that the half-smile in this photo captures Willy's personality a bit better. I had a couple problems when shooting. The first and main one was the shadowing. Today I set out to take some pictures thinking that it would be fun on such a sunny day. I forgot that overcast days can be much more helpful when taking pictures. I would have liked to put Willy in a different place, but his father seemed intent on letting him play freely. I loved that he was in a natural setting, but the shadows are pretty drastic, especially the one that crosses his face. I tried to work with it on my own in Photoshop, but I will need some help in lab. I also had some trouble with the shutter speed on my camera. This is the first digital camera I have owned, and I am still getting used to it. I bought it for DMF, because I did not already own one, so it is taking some adjusting on my part. In the short time that I had with Willy, I took a few pictures, but many of them were incredibly blurry, so this is the only one that I really had to work with. I feel like there are so many things that I still need to learn about my photographer's eye in order to create a photo that tells a story while keeping in mind lighting and positioning and doing it all in a short amount of time if necessary. I did like that, in Photoshop, I was able to adjust the background so that Willy stands out more. I still feel like the picture could use some tweaking though. I would also like to try taking some more pictures with different subjects so that I can work on my camera skills.