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After posting this shot I promised that I’d take a ‘nice’ shot of our daughter to make up for the fact that the majority of her sisters now had decent portraits on this site. But, what with one thing and another, I hadn’t got around to it.

This shot was taken this afternoon while she was watching television. One problem with taking a decent portrait of this one is that she rarely sits still long enough to get her in the frame, let alone compose a decent shot, but she’s been a bit unwell the last few days so she’s a little more sedentary than usual ;-)

As with most of my portraits this one was acheived by adding a blurred layer set to overlay mode. The side effect of this is a bump in contrast, which has blown out the highlights a little, but in this case I think that works quite well to isolate her face.

camera
capture date
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metering mode
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Canon G5
2.09pm on 25/4/04
f3.0
1/5
aperture priority
+0.0
evaluative
50
28.8mm
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4x3 + children [portraits]
comment by zpiti at 08:20 PM (GMT) on 25 April, 2004

juds one word........ Fantastic

comment by gwen at 08:30 PM (GMT) on 25 April, 2004

Your children are breathtaking. I'd love to see a photo of the photos you have displayed in your home (just curious which are your faves...)

Hope your girl is feeling better.

comment by nantel at 11:17 PM (GMT) on 25 April, 2004

Just enough blurring to make it perfect.

comment by Judith Polakoff at 02:41 AM (GMT) on 26 April, 2004

Beautiful!

comment by Jon at 04:22 AM (GMT) on 26 April, 2004

Great portrait Dave. Do you just do a straight blur effect on your soft-focus layer or do you use GB?

comment by myla at 07:50 AM (GMT) on 26 April, 2004

Absolutely lovely shot.

Hope she's feeling better :)

comment by djn1 at 04:11 PM (GMT) on 26 April, 2004

Thanks.

Gwen and myla: yes, thank you, she's much better today.

Jon: sorry, I should have been more specific - I use a GB (Gaussian Blur) set to around 12px on the full size image. If I've already reduced the size I find that around 3 or 4px works quite well.

comment by Rolle at 04:15 PM (GMT) on 26 April, 2004

It looks such a pro-image. I can't hardly believe you shot it while she was watching television. Excellent!

comment by Emily at 11:34 AM (GMT) on 27 April, 2004

lovely portrait. so full of innocence.

and i love the soft focus.

really lovely.

comment by Beth at 05:01 PM (GMT) on 17 June, 2004

She is really beautiful! Excellent picture.

comment by miles at 03:02 AM (GMT) on 4 March, 2005

found this shot linked from your current shot, just wanted to say it's a great portrait!