Emmet

Meet Emmet- the drooling, chewing happy five-month-old. A great kid and such an ease to work with! Was smiling for the whole hour while I was there.

As usual in the full post you will find some more details on the techie side of the pictures.

First the light- all from a window. The table Emmet sat on was right next to it. Some minor warm cast from a light bulb inside the room on the right side can be seen.

I was a bit adventurous when going to this shoot (read damn careless). I left all my lenses at home and only had the Nikon 50mm 1.4 that was on the camera. Well, it was the beloved lens at least, so I had a perfect opportunity to do one of the so popular 'creativity exercises' - limit myself to one focal length. Quite happy with the outcome, I must say!

Now to the post processing. All done in Bibble 5. As usual just playing with different areas; making some brighter, some darker. Here is one of the originals- straight out of camera with 0 as all other adjustments in Bibble.

There were five layers for this picture. First usual exposure adjustments, curves and a Heal/Clone layer to remove a couple of blemishes and something in the bottom left corner obscuring his arm.

Then added a new layer for vignette. I do it by simply masking the layer with curve region and inverting the selection, then play with the curve slider to make surroundings darker. This way I have full control over intensity and shape of vignette.

Afterwards two layers for enhancing darker and lighter areas. Similar to the way I worked with this portrait of a musician, just took it easy this time- after all, it is just a baby... So the darker areas are on his eyebrows, lips and parts of hair. Lighter only the eyes and just a bit.

Finally added noise reduction layer. Was shooting ISO 400, so 100% zoom showed some artifacts in shadow area. NoiseNinja also blurs the image just a bit, so it (sometimes) works as a good softening tool. Because of the softening effect, had to unmask the eyes, nose, lips, eyebrows and most important- the drool- to keep them sharp.

So there. This is how we roll.

I know earlier I promised to write more... It is coming... No more promises :)

Take care, 

M.