Title • do you want me to look up?

I was going to post my initial thoughts about my new 5D Mark II with this entry, but I still haven't had much of an opportunity to try it out so will leave my review for a later date. What I can say though is that I'm very impressed so far, especially with the major improvements to high ISO shooting. I've also been playing around with Live View shooting, and while this isn't something I imagine I'll use all that often, I can see that it's going to be useful. Anyway, I will post a much more in-depth review at some point soon.

As for this shot: it was taken while Rhowan was playing her DS, and was titled in response to one of her comments. She'd been playing for a while, and I didn't think she was paying any attention to the fact that I was photographing her. Suddenly though, without pausing her game, she said "do you want me to look up?". I said yes, she glanced up, and I got the shot. She then went back to her game. I don't know what she'll end up doing when she's older, but she's certainly well on the way to developing a lot of the skills she'd need if she wanted to go into modelling :-)

In terms of the post-production this one was relatively straightforward, i.e. I used the Channel Mixer to convert the image to black and white (as described in this tutorial). In this instance though I used two masked Channel Mixer adjustment layers. The first of these was biased towards the red channel, which I used to lighten her face, while the second was biased towards the blue channel. This one was used to lighten her eyes and darken the background. The image was then adjusted using a few masked curves.

If you're interested, the original is here:

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