POW 2009 Feb 1st

<p>Javier, those two at the stoplight are great. And Duane, love the kid portraits. I've been trying to do the similar now that I have a 50mm.1.4 (ok, two, Tak and A) and your advice is spot on. Alas, my daughters won't look at me any more if I am holding a camera. "No more pictures!" Watching TV is a poor substitute, especially as they face slightly away from the window light.</p><div></div>

<p>Nick, that's a wonderful photo of your daughter. Very well done. I hope you don't mind but I did a B/W conversion on it, sharpened the image a little and increased the fill light a little to see how it looked in B/W. What do you think?</p><div></div>

<p>Personally, I love the edit!</p>

<p>Wow, thanks Duane! That looks great! I had been worrying that I overdid the sharpening on the larger picture, but with downsizing it appears more was needed. And I love how you pulled up the shadows - still working on getting that right. How did you desaturate it? (if you don't mind me asking)</p>

<p>Oh, and I have about 1,000 more if you've got time. :-)</p>

<p>Nick, although I have Adobe CS2 the Master Collection for work use, I didn't use PhotoShop here at all. Just a little freeware program called Picasa 3. My 10 year old daughter finds it easy to use with her digital photos and it's actually fairly decent for quick edits. </p>

<p>Here's all I did,<br>

1) opened the photo in Picasa, 2) sharpened the image a little, 3) selected B/W conversion, 4) adjusted the fill light and shadows with the sliders until I got the look thatgave a nice balance of shadow and highlight.</p>

<p>It worked well simply because you already provided an excellent image to work with. I like the B/W because your daughters eyes become the focus of the image and there is no color to distract the viewer. Hope this helps.</p>

<p>P.S. Hin uses Picasa quite a bit too.</p>