I love these challenges! They’re so fun. The theme this week is “blue” and I immediately thought of this shot. We were in Laguna Beach, and I wanted to take birthday portraits of my son in his new suit. It was an important birthday, since he turned 8. In our religion, kids can choose to be baptized at the age of 8. So, it represented his first real commitment in life. I loved this shot because it showed him going on his own journey, beginning to take his first steps on his own chosen path.

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A sneak peek from my favorite kind of session – the mini session! These kids were probably the most cooperative kids I’ve ever photographed. And pretty cute too!

My sweet little grand-nephew.. Does that make me a great aunt? I’m not sure but this is my nephew’s baby, and he is the sweetest, calmest baby I’ve ever photographed. And the cutest, but I’m not biased or anything…:)

Every Friday over at I heart faces, it’s fix it time! Anyone who wants to can join in -we are all given a photo and a change to fix it up any way we like.

Original:

My “fix-it”:

Here’s what I did:

There was some cleaning up to do on the face and around the mouth. I used the patch tool to clear up the skin. Then I ran portraiture at a very low opacity. The eyes were dark, so I selected the eyes using the select tool in a figure-eight shape, and used curves to bump up the light in the eyes. I also dodged the catchlights just a bit to bring them out.  To convert to black and white I used Gradient Map, then adjusted with curves.