I think you’re being overly critical, as concerns the first one. What you have achieved is highlighting the baby – which ios exactly what the mother would want. My guess is she certainly wouldn’t thank you for lighting up her features at the moment! – but you have captured the emption and the bond. The centre of her life at the moment is the baby and the lighting has done an excellent job of making the baby the central figure in the shot. More experienced people than me have comemnted on the composition.
In any case, if you print it and frame it, the mother will be well pleased.
thank you all for the comments! i really appreciate it and i got a 10×8 print mounted and i’m convinced the mount has done wonders but i’m giving it to them tomorrow so i hope they like it.
The first pictures is very good indeed I would be so pleased to have gotten that I am sure she will like it a lot.
The third one i think would benefit from a less harsh border (i know thats just been said!) but how about a vignete effect instead or just put a blur effect where the current border is just a suggestion and well done.
I think it’s excellent as is. As has been said it captures the moment wonderfully.
As an aside – Even if you’d increased your ISO the exposure would more or less remain the same. Your camera would compensate for the increase of ISO by increasing the shutter speed or fstop or both, depending on how you have the camera set. A better solution would be to either spot meter or use exposure compensation to get closer to the scene you want to expose for. This of course is not relevent if you’re using manual mode, when an increase of ISO would change the effective exposure.