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Maternal bond

A newborn baby looks up at her mother.

I took this using only available light and as it was going toward evening the circumstances were a bit of a challenge. Using my 70-200L lens stopped down to f4 to ensure enough depth of field but still make the best use of the light I had to bump the ISO up to 1600. Luckily the Canon 5D produces very little noise even at high ISO's.

I processed the shot out of RAW using Canon's own software, Digital Professional Photographer and then imported the image into CS2. There I converted it to monochrome via LAB colour to ensure the best grey values. Reconverted it to RGB mode and toned the image.

I wanted a soft look. In the darkroom I was quite fond of doing stocking prints. You tie a piece of stocking over the enlarger lens to diffuse the light. This causes the blacks to bleed out. I love the effect. In Photoshop you can use the glow filter to achieve a similar effect, which is what I did here. I feel it contributes to the mood and atmosphere in the image.

There you have it the final result and how I got there.

More soon....

If you found this article interesting and useful please let me know. Comments always welcome.

Paul
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