Reply To: Here we got please any CC for me, be gentle but honest please

[cameraclicker]

Betty, the comment about the kids and Sound of Music was simply a comment about the impression I got when I viewed the photo.  It is neither negative nor criticism.

I went back and looked at the photo again.  Here are some thoughts, with visuals:

This is what I see on my monitor (clicking on these photos will take you to one of my Flickr pages where you can see the full sized image)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/54048679@N07/11205668275/

As you can see, Pinterest does not resize images so I ended up with a more-or-less square crop of your photo.  The browser window was opened to the width of the Pinterest page and the height of my monitor’s vertical space.

This is the whole image

http://www.flickr.com/photos/54048679@N07/11205680774/

Where does your eye go when you first look at the photo?  To the incorrectly formed copyright notice, then to the bright white balls in the background and finally to the kids.  Is that what you had in mind?

This is a fairly quick edit of your photo

http://www.flickr.com/photos/54048679@N07/11205694076/

Your copyright notice has been moved to the lower right corner, reduced in opacity and has been put into the format specified by most copyright legislation.  A couple of notes about copyright:  You get copyright when you release the shutter.  It protects your image from being used to make money for others, but only if you can afford to go to court to enforce your rights, and if judgment goes against you for some reason, you could be left with a bill for the other party’s legal costs.  The copyright notice indicates you registered the photo with the government’s copyright office.  Copyright legislation has exclusions commonly called Fair Use, which allow certain things to be done with your photo, without your permission.  In the world of Facebook and other sites that remove EXIF data, a watermark of some sort to show ownership is probably a good idea.  Using a watermark to deface your photo is not a good idea.  You can see from the sample above how easy it is to deal with a watermark.

The objectionable white blobs were painted over with green.  The background was blurred a bit more with the blur tool

The faces were lightened and their eyes were sharpened a little.

Compare both photos.  Decide for yourself if the edits are an improvement or not.

Wide apertures have good and bad features.  They let in lots of light so you can shoot with less light.  They have shallow depth of field, relative to smaller apertures at the same focal length and subject/background distances.  This helps if the background is ugly and needs to be hidden.  It is less helpful if you are shooting a portrait and it causes part of your subject to blend into the out of focus background.  This is simply one of the many things you need to be aware of and to take into account when shooting.

I never saw your site, so I can’t be sure, but I suspect it did not suck as much as just having an under construction notice does.  Web sites are almost always a work in progress.  Like our roads, they are always under construction, either to create new pieces, make improvements or fix things.  The standard approach is to leave the existing site in place, create and test the new site, or changes, on an off-line server, then upload the files to implement the changes on the live server.  This limits down time to the time it takes to upload your files.  If the upload is expected to be very long, there are ways of uploading everything into the background then switching the content, though usually this is not required.  A good professional web developer should already know all of this.