Uma and Maz are cute as they come! My first child photography mini-clients are growing up and getting so adorable! Loved working with them and talking to their mother, my dear friend Laura. Please enjoy the images. Photos are all taken with the Nikon D700 and Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G, natural light. One of my favorite combinations!

Post-processing was very quick – I simply imported everything into Lightroom, then cropped and aligned images a little. For the black and white image below, I used Lightroom’s built in functionality for converting to B&W. Under the HSL/Color/B&W panel in Develop Module, I used the following values: Red: 0, Orange: +3, Yellow: 0, Green: -20, Aqua: -35, Blue: -30, Purple: +5, Magenta: +5. To give it a slightly “chocolaty” look, I used “Split Toning” with a slight coloring to Shadows and some tweaks to Hue and Saturation. Then, I used “Strong Contrast” under “Tone Curve” to make B+W look punchier, but it was not enough, so I increased the “Blacks” to 25 under “Basic” to bring up more blacks.

The day was sunny and nice, but the sun was still rather harsh, so I moved the kids under the porch to move away from direct sunlight. As usual, I shot in aperture priority mode and used an aperture of f/3.5, since I was standing rather close and I did not want to blur their faces. At the same time, f/3.5 was small enough to bring the bodies into focus and large enough to blur some of that background :)

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