This is a shot of Finley (left), Harmony (right) and a young boy that they both met at a barbecue we attended recently. As you can see, they had a great time :)

On a more technical note ...

If you've taken a look at the original image you will have noticed that it's quite a bit darker than this version. With the benefit of hindsight I think I probably should have shot a lighter version, and sacrificed some of the background detail, but at the time I decided to expose for the highlights and leave the rest to post-production. That said, the final image does work, but was a lot harder to process than it might have been; particularly in terms of retaining a natural looking tonal balance between the different areas of the image.

We took the kids to a BBQ at a friend's house over the weekend, and while I didn't have a great deal of time for photography I did get four shots that I'll be blogging: this one, and three portraits.

If you're interested, I've also posted some unedited shots on Facebook, including five shots of Tegan (our 8 month old) sitting on the motorbike featured in this image.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=194054&id=624795302

I've also used this image as this week's Mini-PSD as I thought the processing was quite interesting. If you've taken a look at the original you'll see that it was a lot darker than the final version. Normally, I probably wouldn't have underexposed quite this drastically, but the problem with increasing the exposure from the outset was that I would have blown a lot of the detail in the chrome-work and the headlamp. So, I underexposed the original and then used seven masked curves to brighten the image without compromising too much of the detail in the brightest areas of the image. I also used Topaz Detail to bring out a bit more of the fine scale detail in the headlamp.

This one was taken on the same shoot as this one, but I didn't post it at the time as I didn't think it was sufficiently different to warrant a separate post. Since then though I've spent quite a bit of time working on different ways of toning my images. I haven't come to any firm conclusions - either about technique, or the end results - but I am reasonably pleased with the way that this one turned out.

Here's another portrait of Rhowan; the last of the shots I'll be posting from our recent holiday on the Black Sea coast. As with my previous image, the main change that was made to this one was in terms of altering the tone (as described in my Toning Colour Images tutorial). I also used quite a few of the techniques covered in my Portraits: part one tutorial, particularly in terms of lightening and bringing out the detail in her eyes.

As always, let me know your thoughts, particularly in terms of whether you think the toning is effective.

I've been playing around with my Lumix GF-1 over the last few days, especially in terms of shooting with the lens wide open (f/1.7), and have been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the shots I've been getting, in terms of both sharpness and bokeh. That said, this one could have been a bit sharper, but I think this is more to do with the fact that Rhowan was moving and I was shooting at 1/30s than anything to do with the lens. Anyway, technical discussion aside, I quite like this one :)

I have loads of shots of Rhowan that I like, and almost as many of Harmony, but I have very few of them together. As such I think that this one will prove to be a favourite of mine for quite some time to come. As always, let me know what you think.

In other news, we're offering a 25% discount on our Photoshop tutorials to celebrate the 4th of July. Happy Holidays :)

http://www.chromasia.com/tutorials/online/

This is a shot of Harmony, sitting by the pool outside our holiday apartment. For most of the week we were away she had a great time but, inevitably, there were some moments that were clearly less enjoyable than others. This was definitely one of them :)

In other news: we've just added our first Critique Slot Screencast to our Photoshop Tutorials. The basic idea is that I work through and critique one of our member's images, then reprocess the original RAW file to produce a new version. It was an interesting experience for me, not least because I'm much more used to writing tutorials than producing screencasts, but it's had some really great feedback so far s we'll definitely be doing more of them.