Question: I have to know how you created the picture of the baby(what f stop,etc). Also where was the light source. I have heard that north facing windows are the best, have you found this to be true? Do you edit anything with Photoshop or another program or do you just get it perfect at time of exposure?

Note: Images referred to are in the before-after gallery.

Light

Lighting is critical. For an image like the eyelashes picture, it has to be diffused, natural light. I just try to put the baby inside away from windows but facing them. That’s why north-facing is what you heard, but it could be anywhere and depends on the weather. My favorite light is a bright cloudy day so that there is some shadow–not too flat and even and not too bright. I like to have the subject facing the light/window at least partially to get some catchlights in the eyes. This works really well on a bright cloudy day, and evening and morning light has a wonderful, warm quality.

Another way to think of it is as light that is directional–meaning that it shows a lighter area and shadow areas on the subject. You just don’t want it completely direct so that the shadows are not gradual, but are sharp, and then you have to fill the shadows too much (a little is manageable but I usually don’t have the equipment/time/extra people to get into filling shadows too much). Further, I think that the shadows make the image. With no shadow, it’s just a flat image from JCPenney taken in a studio. The picture of Megan that you liked is a good example of this (more than the lashes picture, which was an experiment that’s a bit different. It need flat/diffused light to make the lashes even.)

As for taking this lashes picture, you stand above the subject and compose tightly, filling the whole frame, using a large aperture. This picture was f6 at 55mm which is an aperture smaller than I thought it would have been so you can probably do this with the lens you have. I would highly recommend a 50mm f2 lens, though. The Nikon one I have was only $100 and it’s been worth it’s weight in gold. If you take outside pictures, I also recommend a good polarizing filter.

Digital Image Processing

Underexposing and shooting in RAW

And as for editing in Photoshop, Picasa, or the editor of your choice, it’s essential. I’ve put up a gallery of before-after pictures to show you what I did for the lashes picture and for the picture of Megan. If you shoot JPG, the camera develops the image for you and you can do whatever you want after. If you shoot RAW, then you can do the developing instead of your camera and you can adjust for exposure much more. I view the captured image almost like it consists of building blocks that I then process and polish. If you mess up and don’t get the info you need, there’s not much Photoshop can do.

So what this means for portraits is that its good to underexpose. I usually have my camera set to automatically underexpose by at least 1 stop. For the lashes picture it was 1 2/3 stops. The reason is that you never want to blow out highlights because that’s completely lost information. There’s nothing there. And you want to make sure you get good shadow detail which you can always lighten later. That way you get good detail in highlights and shadows. We have similar cameras (Nikon d-SLRs), so you may feel this way too, but I think my camera’s automatic setting overexposes.

Contrast and Sharpening

The other reason to get to know a little about digital image editing is that all digital images are soft and are hazy/dull just because of how digital cameras work. So at a minimum I always have to increase contrast to remove the haze. Lots of times, I’ll keep the softness for portraits that have areas that are blurred out anyway by the large aperture but select just the eyes and sharpen them.

Summary

So #1, I take the image so that the info I want is there (underexpose and shoot in RAW). Then #2 and #3 I increase contrast and sharpen. This can be done in Photoshop Elements. Picasa is free and I’ll often use the “glow” feature to increase contrast in portraits (I haven’t figured out how to get a similar look in Photoshop either.) if I don’t want to mess with Photoshop and depending on if it works for the image. But Picasa’s sharpening is pretty rough and dirty and can hack up your image, so I’d for sure do sharpening in photoshop.

I’m sure these ideas will just raise more questions, but I hope it helps. Happy Shooting!