Having a birthday 3 days after Christmas can be really hard. I'm lucky as my birthday is in July and of course Christmas being when it is means every 6 months or so I get some gifts. On the other hand, Cameron's birthday is on December 28th and in the last few years we've taken to the practice of letting him spend some of his birthday money (about 1/2 of it) in the summer on something special so it makes the long wait easier. Well, he's been wanting a new skateboard. He of course loves Bam (some modern pro-skater) and so today we went shopping for a new board. Specifically it had to be an Element brand board and the double bonus would be if it was a Bam board. Thank the Lord that the skate shop only had one Element board and it was a Bam model! Decision making never was easier! His new board is really cool with an electric guitar design on it.
So we came home and put it all together (using some of the parts of his older board) and now he's a happy camper. Of course that meant he owed me a picture or two!
My wife had the bright idea of using the golden light, which turned out great! She requested that I somehow convert everything to Black and White (because of Cameron's mis-matched colors), and I tried that but then I lost the golden effect so I had to go back to color. I figure this way I've captured Cameron as he is. He's an 8 year old who has his own sense of style. Soon enough he'll have to worry about matching colors and all the crud that goes along with looking the way everyone else wants him to look. I did some extra PS trickery including blurring the background layer more than it was and toning down the saturation there too.
Shot spex: RAW Image, Pentax K10D, ISO 400, 48mm, f4.5, 1/60 sec., no flash.
PhotoShop spex: Smart Sharpened (as always), adjusted Levels, adjusted Brightness/Contrast, then I cropped until I found something I liked.
Nice work. Your cutout to get the blur layer worked very well I think. He looks proud of his board and the light on his face is great.
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