Thursday, May 7, 2009

Learning to balance


This challenge is a somewhat poignant one for me. Today marks nine months since my daughter was born, so it's in some sense a balancing point in that she's now been alive outside my body for the same amount of time she was alive inside my body.

She's also recently started pulling up on furniture, learning to balance herself. I know she's getting ready to walk (though I'm hopeful it'll still be a few months before she figures out that trick).

Anyway, the picture is of my husband helping my daughter stand. It was taken outside our apartment building in natural light on a cloudy evening. Settings: ISO 400, f8.0, 1/100 sec. I used the wrong white balance, so I played with the colors using the curves function in gimp to make it look a little more natural and more saturated.

cc, as always. If anyone wouldn't mind commenting on the white balance/color corrections, I attempted some different stuff on other photos that are posted on my personal blog. Thanks!

4 comments:

Katy said...

Oh she's such an angel baby!!! What a cool time... to realize she's been "out" as long as she was "in"! And the days where they are learning new tricks left and right, so much fun! I looked at your blog... very cute!! and after looking at all of them, i'm happy you went with this one... they're all sooo cute, but this one's totally my fave!! GREAT JOB!

Mindy said...

What a sweet picture!! Your other pictures on your blog are adorable too! White balance IS a tricky thing. If you have the ability to shoot RAW with your camera, you can easily change white balance later. If not, just experiment to see what works. I usually leave mine on auto, then tweak if it doesn't look right. If I don't get it right before editing, I just play around with warming it or cooling it until it looks right to me. Sometimes I feel like I can't fix it, but I just tell myself I'll do better next time around! ;)

B-Blogit said...

love the brick background in this just adds to the picture I think.

kristine N said...

I am shooting in RAW, but I haven't found a program that will open the RAW file that's linux compatible.

I realized after taking all of my photos (and after it started raining--which meant no more pictures) that I was set to the wrong white balance setting. So, I tried warming it with the curves function. This was the best I could do, which I think isn't too far off from reality. She doesn't look like an alien anymore anyway :)

Thanks for the discussion!