Meet The Princess

Meet The Princess
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I love this picture! Everyone who saw also loved it ! One colleague even suggested that I should try some professional Photography !

Hmm... Well may be not yet. Afterall, there is no guarantee that every picture I take will be as good as this one, because there is definitely an element of Luck involved. Not to say that this picture came out nice just by pur luck, but I just feel that the moment captured in the picture gave me more satisfaction then I had expected for my effort.

As this is a blog about "learning Photography" & "sharing experience", I thought I should put some details that can help someone else take a similar picture. Read on...

Title : "Meet The Princess"
Well, The title was a very obvious choice. The viewer is meeting my little 7 month old princess and my little princess is meeting her plastic princess doll.

Subject
At this age, babies really get very curious of the world around them. They want to grab everything they can reach (and cannot reach!). I wanted to capture this instinctive behavior in some way as a sweet memory of this phase of early development. So the real subject is the interaction - that hand stretched to grab the doll and the eyes locked on the doll.

Location
In a corner of our bedroom, a perfect place to provide a homely background. There was a stand up fan also over there which I did not remove. You can see the base of it behind the doll. I thought it looked nice behind the doll and with its gradual slope, it provided a nice venue for the plastic royalty to stand.

Lighting
All natural day light. No flash (I am really not fond of flash photography). The window provided the right amount of light to illuminate Baby's face. Also I had not noticed it at the time, but the gradual shadow on the wall nehind provides a really nice background for the relatively small secondary subject - the plastic princess - to stand out.

Composition
You can easily see that The Rule of Thirds is playing a clear role here. To achieve a good balance between the two subjects (Baby and the doll) The rule of thirds was natural. Also the real subject - the interaction - is right in the middle of the picture!

Trials
I must have tried at least three different angles and finally settled down on the one closest to the floor. Also, at F2.8 and ISO100, shutter was at 1/50s and many shots were wasted with motion blur due to Baby moving around. This one is not perfect either as you can see the her hands show little bit of motion blur. And with the Deceiving LCD, You can't tell if the picture you just clicked was the perfect one. So instead of leaviong things to luck, I take more pictures even at the same angle.

Editing
The original picture is in color.

• At ISO100, I really did not like the noise. I filtered it using Free Version of Neat Image.
  Rest of the changes were done in Picasa2 (Free from Google).
• Straightened using door frame as reference.
• Filled little more light.
• Added Glow. I really like this effect.
• Converted to Sepia. I also tried black and white. but I really liked the timelessness exerted by Sepia.
• Did minor Contrast adjustments.

The only regret I have is, I wish I could have used a wider depth of field. at ISO100, I was really trying to limit the shutter speed to avoid motion blur from baby's movements. Only option was to increase th Aperture which narrowed the depth of field. I don't think the depth of field was that good, because not all of the blur in the picture is caused by motion. Oh well, that's the limitation I have to accept for a G5.