Title • at play on the beach #3

This is the third and final shot in this series and I suspect that it will be the least liked. Well, actually, I suspect that some of you will like the odd feel, and some of you won't, but it's a style that I'm quite drawn to – reasonably cold colours, undersaturated, odd colour balance. And I don't know if anyone else will see it this way but to me it almost looks as though the foreground – Rho and the spade – are pasted in from a polaroid.

And I suppose I should confess that this shot was a partial accident, though I will try to replicate the style at some point. I was trying to take a shot of the spade (and have a similar shot that I'll put up tomorrow), but as I composed it Rho dived into the scene moaning about wanting to play with her spade – which was fair enough ;-) I also inadvertently focussed on the horizon rather than the spade. Anyway, the end result is a rather oddly exposed shot, that's focussed on what would normally be the background detail (leaving the foreground nicely diffused), but I like the way it turned out. So, it's quite different from both the other two and my usual style so I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

And finally, I posted the following in a comment on yesterday's entry that I think is worth reiterating here:

What I try and do with my photographs of our children is portray them as something more that just children. It's relatively easy to point the camera down at them and portray them through the eyes of an adult, but what I'm trying to do is show them in their own world – where they have far more power and presence.

Update: Apologies to anyone who looked at this before 9.00pm BST. I forgot to add the flash details to the EXIF data but have fixed it now.

2.27pm on 28/6/05

Canon 20D

EF 17-40 f/4L USM

17mm (27mm equiv.)

f/8.0

1/160

aperture priority

-2/3 (-2/3 FEC)

evaluative

100

580EX

RAW

C1 Pro

minor