Sleeping Child

This is photo that I took for a competition with the theme "close-up". I didn't have a digital camera of my own at the time (to speak of), so I took the photo with an Olympus digital camera that I borrowed from a brother-in-law. I converted the photo to black & white by playing around with various channels - mostly it came from the K channel in CMYK mode with a bit of the other channels mixed in to avoid the completely blank areas that you get with the K channel by itself. The detail in the photo was a little soft for my liking, so used the pen tool in two ways to help to improve it a little:

• I used the pen to create masks along some of the lines that needed to be sharpened up a little (for example along the eyelids, nostrils, etc.). Ironically the masks needed to be blurred a little (with the blur brush) because the lines directly from the pen tools were a bit too sharp on their own. I used the resulting masks to sharpen things up a little by lightening / darkening along the edge of the mask as appropriate.
• I draw paths along each of the eye-lashes (ok, so I had too much time on our hands!) and stroked the paths with a black brush using simulated pressure. This resulted in reasonably realistic, sharp lashes which were a significant improvement on the originals which were a bit too blurred and grainy for my liking (although, again, I had to reintroduce some blurring in places to soften them back down a little).

Picture Frames

The idea for this came from a similar idea that I had seen somewhere else at some point in the past. I rigged up a white sheet as a background and got each person to sit on the sheet (one at a time) holding a framed picture (borrowed from various walls around the house!). The actual picture in the frame that they were holding didn't matter. Once all the individual photos were taken, I opened them in Photoshop - converted them to black & white (primarily by converting to CMYK and using the K channel mixed with a little of some of the other channels) - and then used "free transform" to transform then so that they fitted into the frame that the other person was holding. I also had to do some erasing of the background here and there to touch things up.

If you've got kids (or know someone who has), then why not give this idea a try yourself - it's not particularly difficult, fun and is a bit different from just a straight family shot.

Wedding Book

I don't think that I would really want to be a professional wedding photographer - too stressful and repetitive, I think - however, I do quite enjoy it when I get roped into taking wedding photos for someone once in a while. In the past, I have always had to work with film, so I was quite excited when the opportunity came along for me to cover a wedding digitally for the first time. In particular, I wanted to put together a photo book with the shots from the wedding. The result is shown below - each image shows facing pages from the final book. The bride and groom were happy with it at least :)

I used a Sigma 24-70 f2.8 lens and a mixture of available light and bounced flash (except during the actual service when I was not allowed to use a flash so used available light only).

[Note that these photos link to my old Flickr ID - there were too many of them for me to get round to moving them all to the new "Delight in Light" account.]