Family funtimes

levi as david caruso, originally uploaded by Mr. Wright.

From a family baby shower about a week ago. Maybe it's the red hair, maybe it's because L. looks like he's picking up a piece of evidence, but I thought of David Caruso when I was editing this shot.

Some technical notes: I shot the entire shower with my 35mm lens. No complaints. I really like its versatility. Now I just need to work on controlling depth of field better. Also a tip for you cold-blooded baby shooters out there. To make your little devil look angelic, it's a pretty simple matter of editing, using mainly the dodge tool. After you've done basic edits to the entire frame, use the dodge tool to basically remove all the shadows from the kid's face. It's best to do it slowly in several steps, switching often between dodging midtones and dodging highlights. If the features ever begin to look washed out, you can restore proper contrast by burning in the shadows.

Taken to its extremes, this method produces children who appear to radiate purity. It's popular on Flickr. Here is one good purveyor of the style.