February 26, 2012 – A year of portraits – Taelor Morse

Today I captured this portrait of Taelor Morse, a young member of my church here in Madisonville, Ky. He’s in the fifth grade at Pride Avenue School and his teacher is my niece, Kelly Gates. A nice young man that is full of energy and seems to be on a quest to acquire all the knowledge he can as he’s always asking questions, which in my book is great!

Photo was processed using Photoshop CS5 with no cropping from how I shot the original photo. We were standing at the entrance of the sanctuary and the lighting was really nice. By using a f/stop of 2.8 I kept my depth of field really shallow to blur out the background. I didn’t have to make much in the way of levels adjustments on the mid-tones, but I did do some burning down a little around him to help draw the focus to him. For the final touch I applied the Topaz Adjust filter called “Simple Pop” to apply a little bit of snap to the sharpness.

Camera: Nikon D700
Lens: Nikon 50mm f/1.4
Exposure: Matrix Metering, 1/30, f/2.8, ISO of 1,000
File Type: Nikon RAW