Taken with the Nikon D40 in Layton, Utah on March 3, 2009. Manual Exposure Mode, 55mm, 1/125sec at f/5.6 ISO 200, Nikon Raw Format converted to Adobe DNG format. Edited in Lightroom 2.3

I love this photo of my daughter for a lot of reasons.  It really catches her sweet and happy personality and really embodies the innocence that children possess.  When I look into her eyes and admire her beautiful face, a flash of memories go through my mind that show her great personality.  Those thoughts make me so happy.  Madeleine is a very important part of our family and we love her very much.  I don’t know what we would do without her!  Her brother and I are going to have to fight off all the boys that will line up to get her phone number!  I’m already worried!

I put up a some cool shots of Nate a few days ago that were a lot of fun to take and process.  Mad’s birthday is coming up soon and we needed a similar type of image for her birthday invitations (I’ll post the invite soon) and they also happen to go along with Nate’s very well.  I used my SB-600 flash camera left with my 45” shoot-thru umbrella for soft lighting of the face with a white reflector camera right to fill the shadows just a little. Nate has a little 1.5’ tall train table that makes an awesome platform for photographing the little ones (see setup graphic below).  This setup is very simple and I love the great catchlights in the eyes that this setup provides.  Catchlights make people look “alive” and I always try to have them in my portraits.

In post processing I increased the exposure and contrast a little and converted the exposure to black and white.  I made several adjustments to the color channels to get the black and white conversion right (this is like using color filters on the lens).  I wanted it to match Nate’s portrait from the other day so I used the split toning controls to give the warm color to the black and white image.  I used the adjustment brush to bring out her eyes.  I made a Lightroom preset for my split-toning treatment and an adjustment brush preset for eyes (I’ve been using this on some of our recent photos).  If any Lightroom users are interested let me know and I might share them with you.  🙂  The preset for eyes is part of the adjustment brush tool and only works with Lightroom 2.

If you want even more details related to this image you can get them on the more properties page for this image on flickr (it even documents the tweaks I made with the adjustment brush).  I hope you enjoy this photo and hope you enjoy yourself behind the lens!