Abby

ISO 200 f 1.7 ss 1/250

Here is a picture from this summer of Abby I just got around to editing. I had to try it out in black and white and color. There are two color conversions I tried. They are similar, but I would love to know which you prefer out of the three. I love these pictures of her. They show her cute little curls-love the humidity for that, and beautiful eyes. I love that I can see my own reflection in the catchlights of her eyes. Very cool.

 
For the photography gurus: This was taken with natural light (no flash) around 8pm in the summer- so around sunset. The sun was camera right quite low in the sky. The light was fading quickly and I was in partial shade so the white balance was a bit off-it had a sort of blue tint to it. I was able to adjust that in photoshop. I usually leave my white balance on auto on my camera and it does a fairly good job, but sometimes its very hard to read the light especially when it is changing quickly like when the sun is setting. Learning to custom white balance in my next task.

Abby has very fair colored skin so I needed to overexpose by a stop so her face wouldn't under expose. Your camera is going to see her light skin and think" this is too bright I better not let in as much light" thus giving a perfect exposure reading in camera, but her skin would end up looking kind of gray/underexposed instead of light like it really is. The general rule is overexpose 2/3-1stop for light skin, underexpose by a half to a full stop for dark skin. With dark skin your camera is doing the opposite. It sees the dark skin and think that there should be more light added, thus giving an unnatural looking skin instead of a beautiful chocolate brown color.

So if you are shooting in manual mode-have the little ticker at the bottom so it reads one stop to the + side. Each little line is usually 1/3 or 1/2 a stop (check your camera menu for that) so it's actually a couple little lines to get to a full stop. The stop usually has a bigger line. Something like this + l 11 l 11 o 11 l 11 l - I hope I explained that good enough.

In overexposing, I blew the whites in her shirt. (the whites got so light there is little to no detail left in the white areas) White is tricky to photograph. If you are having to adjust too much to get the face exposed correctly and all your whites are blowing, then you need to either move your subject to get more light on their face, use a reflector to bounce some light on their face, or use some sort of flash (my least favorite). In this instance I had to choose which I was willing to lose. I decided to expose for the face because it was my main focus of the picture anyways, and lose the detail in the shirt. I think it still works great even with the shirt issues. If I would have blown areas in her face I probably would have pitched it or just kept it for her scrapbook.