The first post of 2010, and the lucky subject is my god-son Samuel, in a photo which has almost without fail illicited the same response from everyone who has seen it up to now: “Awwwww….”. Samuel is cultivating two new teeth at the moment and I presume these are the reason for his tendency to wrinkle his face and have a bit of a chew of his own mouth. Either that, or he just likes making funny faces.
To be honest, Samuel’s cute wrinkled mouth carries this photo, which is technically not the strongest and most kindly described as “soft”. I captured the moment at the expense of accurate focus, but then again this was me taking some casual photos in my parents house, so who cares?
The original shot was technically weak in another way also – it was underexposed by about a stop. I was bouncing flash off the ceiling (it was taken on the same night that I photographed Samuel’s brother and sister) and for whatever reason on this occasion the TTL flash didn’t push out enough light to give me a correct exposure. Because I was shooting in RAW however I was able to increase the exposure by the required amount without degrading the image significantly.
Other processing steps involved increasing the contrast and recovering some detail in the shadows (particulary Samuel’s eyes) and the highlights (which got pushed towards pure white when the exposure was increased). I did this processing in Aperture, but could have achieved a similar result by applying a curve in Photoshop.
It was mentioned to me again over Christmas that it would be useful if I showed the “Before” image as well as the “After” image for blog posts, so as a New Year’s resolution of sorts, I thought I should start 2010 by facilitating that request, with a promise to show many more shots straight from the camera for comparison with the post-processed final images.
To see the original file as it came from the camera (albeit with the default RAW->JPEG conversion for Nikon D300 files, and resized to a web-friendly size) click on the thumbnail on the right.
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