Help on this "portrait" & conversion

Finally got a few decent snaps of Miss Emilie today. It's really hard to catch a vibrant 22mos old!   Seems like just as I get things lined up, she heads off in a new direction or turns her back to the camera.

I realize she's rather strongly backlit. There's a glass sliding door behind her with afternoon sun.

I'm interested in comments on composition, as well as the B&W conversion. Is it too contrasty? Re: the composition, I cut off her foot in shooting, not in cropping. It's set with a 4x6 restriction on the crop, and is at the far left and bottom edges of the frame. I was trying to get rid of the hot window area above her head.

Suggestions/thoughts are appreciated!

D200 50mm f/1.8 ISO400 EV+0.3
Converted in RAW in PS Elements 5.0

 

Wow, thanks! :smile:

The conversion was something from Kelby's book on PSE. Simply slid the saturation slider (in the RAW converter) all the way left, adjusted the temp and exposure sliders, and then finally used the shadows and contrast sliders to make things "pop" a bit more.

He has another method too, if you've shot in JPG, it's a bit more complex.

Thank you Keith! :smile:

 

Yes, give me a sec and I'll get the original (uncropped) converted and saved as JPG and upload to PBase.

 

Ok, hopefully this file works for you. It's the NEF file, left in the B&W conversion as I had it, and saved as a .PSD It's large, around 11meg, not cropped or sharpened.

Full picture

 

Very nice!! I like how tight you were able to get in on this, and yet still leave in the "story" of the couch.

Thank you for your time! :smile:

 

David,

It's gotta be this monitor. When I viewed the picture on my laptop (via this thread), it's definitely NOT as contrasty as it looks to me on this computer. I went ahead and had a print made at Walgreens, and like the laptop, not as contrasty as this monitor.

Perhaps it's time to investigate the convoluted world of monitor calibration (and hope that I don't end up viewing everything in plaid!).

 

Thanks Woody!

I do have question for you: if I was skilled at using fill flash, would it have helped with lighting her face a bit more? I have very little comfort with using flash, and thus haven't bought one (only have the pop-up on the D200).

 

Steve, I really like this! I wasn't sure when I was playing with it if I liked what *I* was doing with a more right-hand crop, but you did a great job!

Is the Gorman action something that is here in the tutorials? Or is it a PS tool?

 

Thank you! We really enjoy her, she's a very kind and happy soul. :smile:

I will look up Gorman in the tutorials, thank you. :smile: