Playing Jack-in-the-Box

Playing Jack-in-the-Box 50mm, f/2.5, 1/200s, ISO 400

My daughter watched someone’s children at our house tonight and while we were all playing around with them I decided to get the camera out and see if I could capture a few cute pictures for this girl’s mother.  This little girl was entertaining me with the jack-in-the-box while I laid on my belly in front of her snapping pictures.  This was a really cute shot but I ran into one problem.  I was shooting with 50mm lens and an on-camera flash with a 1/4 CTO gel bounced up and slightly behind me.  That setup was producing great images until I ended up in a spot on the floor near our (very) red recliners.  The back of the recliner sloped back such that when I rolled up against it the flash pointed directly up into the red cloth.  Well, that made for a VERY pink child — no recovering from that without a lot of work in post and I doubt that I could have actually pulled it off.

So, I decided to go B+W with the image and ended up finding a great Lightroom preset called “WOW Glow 10” which produced a grayscale image that was very pleasing.  It was certainly better than I was coming up with doing my own B+W conversion with the channel mixer in Photoshop.  I added some sharpening around the eyes, boosted contrast in the eyes with an s-curve, added a heavy vignette, a slight crop, and that was it.  I have some ideas for improvement (I’ve been going through David Nightingale’s tutorials and have all sorts of ideas now) but IMO this is a great result for a 5-minute photo shoot and 5-minute edit.  I’ll probably play around with some toning via curves when I get the chance but otherwise might just call this one done.