LightningPaul

A little boy full of joy showing his little self found shelf of a mussel. I took several pictures of him but the expression on this one was really special and unique. It's one you normally don't see on the face of three year old child.


TECH-INFO: To get such an expression you need to have a mix of good interaction, a willing model, taking enough pictures and some luck too. I took around ten shots. Half of them were not sharp enough, due to badly focusing or the child moving too fast outside the DOF. The others had many nice expressions but this one was the most unique one.

Besides the boy this image has four important (technical) ingredients. First, I used a 35mm prime lens (similar as a 50mm on a full frame camera), set almost fully wide open to get a limited DOF. I choose f/2.0 because of it's excellent sharpness, wider open and the lens softens too much.  Second, I used a large soft box of one meter by one meter. You might think that these are very expensive but in my case it was a bedroom window powered by indirect sunlight. Very cheap though not that portable :-) The light was coming from behind me. You can see my silhouette in the reflections of the eyes of the boy.

Third, I used RAW format. Normally I prefer to get everything right in camera and use JPG. But here I have set the camera on aperture mode (so it determines the exposure instead of me) because the boy and I were moving all the time. So it was easier to compensate over or under exposure, like I had here. Fourth, I used my newly self made contrast preset, which I describe here in detail. Finally I enhanced and tweaked the contrast and saturation slightly in several places, and added vignetting. The big portion of noise is due to the exposure lift in ACR, my contrast boosting preset and the ISO400 setting. Initially I removed it using Noise Ninja but I decided to leave it because it looks a bit like grain and it fits well for this portraits.