Little Miss C

I was lucky enought to re-visit a client from a newborn shoot this week, here is Little Miss C, still as gorgeous as ever!

The joela photography website has also undergone on update to the galleries and information to make it easier to use.

And sometimes its not...

After a horrible shock when I picked up my D300 yesterday and the AF had stopped working I had renewed motivation to go out & shoot, of course I have 2 children so what I did (after changing lenses in dis-belief a few times and fiddling enough to get it working) is stay in & shoot of course...

This was one of the resulting shots, the others were of flowers that I got for my birthday this week. This was shot with my 50mm f1.8 lens, my favorite lens of all time but doesn't quite do its capabilities justice. As I was infact shooting the real-life 5 year old daughter and not a stuffed version she moved all the time so rather than shoot at f1.8 like I'd like to I shot at f4 to give me a slightly deeper DoF and some error room for the endless 5 year old shuffle.

To edit this shot was all about layers. I liked the original so to preserve it exported from lightroom as a TIFF to PS and used adjustment layers to make sure I didn't do anything I couldn't get rid of.

First layer: sharpening. Duplicate the background layer + run high pass filter at 2 pixels. Then add an inverted layer mask and paint in the sharpening to the areas of the image you want it (white a soft white brush). In this case I painted in over the feather. Then switch the blending mode to hard light or soft light, whatever your preference.

Second layer: black + white conversion. In this image to enhance the contrast I lightened the yellows and darkened the reds, but only very slightly.

When I was happy with these the image was flattened and the background duplicated again. The duplicate layer I set to a blending mode of colour dodge which vastly enhances the highlight areas of the image, too much in fact. I added an inverted layer mask and using a soft white brush set to 35% opacity and 40% flow painted in the highlights I wanted to emphasise.

So all in all for a fairly simple black and white image it took much longer to edit than a standard portrait!

Challenging

As part of a course I have to present some landscape and still life shots. This is so far outside my comfort zone I may need a street map!

So set off today to shoot around Newcastle city centre, yes in the midday sun, harsh light poor shadows, no midtones but what else can you do with a 3 year old in tow and a 5 year to pick up shortly afterward?

May head back down if the opportunity becomes available to get some child free time nearer sunset, unlikely as thats pretty late here at the moment. So for now a hot chocolate tinged black & white conversion will have to suffice! So instead of a processing preset to download today's title link will click through to a much better and mroe experienced regional landscape photographer.