Fascination and Babies

The two normally go together for a lot of mothers, and even fathers, 'fascination and babies'. Absorbed by their own creation, a new release of life. For those that don't have children don't ever look at babies the same way. So when I was asked "Would you like to take some photos of my baby" I looked at it more from a photographer's point of view as "I just read some hints and tips articles about photographing kids, I'd love to apply that knowledge to good use", rather than "ohhh, a baby!!! how cute would that be!"

Well as it turns out, I found baby Nathans huge transfixed eyes and simple little smile quite cute, maybe I can see the fascination. It's the stories the mother tells you after your initial thought of that though that makes you go "yuck, maybe not"


To start off with, we had Nathan placed on a soft creamy coloured fleece. I was worried that the bright studio lights at 560 watts might blind him or cause him to cry, squint or give me evils. But as it turns out he was more interested in me the whole way through the shoot which made taking photos of him a doddle.







With the bright red football shirt on, I thought maybe it would be better to try with a black background, and maybe apply some tips and tricks I learnt about using sepia to make the picture stand out. As I found with young children and babies, they tend to suffer from heat rashes, red blotches and exzma around the face. So a lot of red colour alteration was required as time progressed as Nathan's face was ticking over like a red hot boiler in all his clothes.

I added some grain (noise) and went to town with the contrast settings with the photo on the left, I quite like it personally, but is as always the way, everyone has different perceptions of what they like.

 With the next two images you see I decided to use what I had learnt from taking photos of a band at a gig. How can the two possibly be related and how can that help? Well, it's the red lights from stage sets and how I round a way to edit out the red light whilst still retaining skin colour tones! It takes a lot of painstaking effort, The photo on the left here probably took me about an hour of careful touching up and alterations to get that healthy glowing look. The original photo would look quite flat in comparison, showing huge amounts of bright red skin along Nathans cheeks, top left of his forehead and on top of his shoulders. What I like about working with such a large photo, is you can zoom in at 100%, the photo is still in focus, crisp and sharp to the point you can see almost every skin pore. Otherwise when it comes to changing skin colours and contrast you'd be left with pixelated blobs of mess which you can only get rid of by smoothing the skin. But then you'd end up with a photo of a baby that looked like it had plastic for skin.

The last one captures Nathan's natural foot fetish. He was always grabbing it and pulling it up to his face, but it looked so natural and what you expect babies to do most of the time.

All in all I was happy with the end results, I learnt a lot about editing the skin tones from this little project and hopefully I can put that to good use next time I go round someone's house to photograph their ickle one.

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