Julia - how it was made

I proudly present the latest member of our family- Julia. She just turned one month! I don't have to say we are more than happy to have her. A note of sanity- this post is not about how Julia was made, it is more about the photo... ;)

The photo was taken in a very homey environment (read there was a ton of clutter and no preparation). But that is the way it is with small babies- you can not schedule a nice pose when they are one month old. Just keep that camera handy!

First off- 50mm lens to the rescue. It will bokeh out any clutter there is! As with no preparation I still needed extra light and the quickest way to get there is to bounce flash. The head of SB-800 was turned south-west (towards back and left). The wallpapers in this room are grayish, so no color cast problems of any kinds. That is it- result is the image above (direct export from a raw file without any modifications).

Now it is time to remove remaining distractions- the little bit of mom, spot of dust on Julias forehead and the colors (mom is wearing green stripes... eeeewwwww). Crop, healing and conversion to BW were all done in Bibble 5 (now called Corel After Shot Pro). Black and white was converted with Red-Blue Maximum filter.

The only remaining things I have done to get to the final image (the one on top of this post) were vignette and brightened the eyes just a little bit. That was done in Bibble as well.

Outcome is already satisfactory for blog. If you look really carefully (or if it were full resolution image) you would see some small white flakes on her skin. The biggest one being right under her nose. See it now? Well, all of that was cleaned up in GIMP before the picture went into print!

One more time- happy birthday kid! Wish you many more happy months to come ;)

Off to change the diaper now...

M.