Baby Photography (Poppy)

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Baby Photography (Poppy)

[© Copyright] 5 Apr 2010 Dylan O'Donnell
CATEGORY : Portraits
7,463 others viewed this post.

Move over Anne Geddes, I’m quitting my job as a professional Web Developer to pursue my career as a celebrity baby photographer! Well not quite, and it’s hard to take a bad baby shot with such a cute subject, but here are a few insights into this photo that might help you. First, you have to make the baby look at you by talking like a happy idiot and waving your arms. In post production I cleaned up some minor details (grass, food on face etc) with the clone tool then brought my levels in tight (dark blacks, light whites) and manually adjusted white balance by dropping the blue channel for that warm afternoon glow. I applied fairly heavy sharpening (unsharp mask) to the eyes and mouth, then a smart filter heavy Gaussian blur which I subtracted using a layer mask and a diagonal cylinder gradient. This gives it a short depth of field effect and makes it look like I have better lenses than I do! After that the final step is to resize to the pixel width you need and finally apply some light unsharp mask to the resized image. I know it sounds a little technical, but it can really make an ordinary photo look much better. These steps can be applied to any kind of portraiture.

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