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Mother and baby son; 29 Nov 2013.
We went over to see our friends’ new baby. My wife waded in with some of her wonderful knitting – a cardigan and a blanket – and almost as an after thought I took a camera.
Our friend is a warm and caring person and, with the camera making more noise than I’d have liked (how I wished for a Leica!), I managed to catch her loving smile. That smile, those gentle and concerned hands – this is love, and it certainly makes me feel good. It is one of the huge things that Life is all about.
But, on the downside, absent mindedly grabbing a camera, I took the wrong one for the job.
Because while the D800 is a superb machine, jamming all those pixels into that full frame sensor does make it struggle a bit in low light – and low (but beautiful) light is what there was. And so, at over 25,000 ISO, to grain and more grain. Which is certainly not a catastrophic thing, especially if presented in mono, but the fact remains that I would have done better to take the D700 which, with a third of the D800’s pixels, is much handier in low light – while producing distinctly less bulky files too, of course.
I focused on the baby’s eye, shot wide open at f2.8 and, using matrix metering, let the rest take care of itself. I’ve toned down some of the backdrop, particularly that at mid to upper left, which was near a window. I had a flash with me, but I’m always wary of using flash in close proximity to babies and, besides, I much prefer natural light if I can get it – light from a single window can be just glorious.
D800 with 105mm Nikkor; 25,600 ISO; Silver Efex Pro’s Antique Portrait preset.
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