I love shooting people. There's an inherent connection we make with other people through images, because after all, we're people too. I like celebrating that.
That being said, I also want to try things out of my comfort zone as I think all other sorts of images can be absolutely wonderful too. In this challenge, however, I'm guessing most of the shots will be of nine "things," so I decided that going with a person as the subject of my image again would be a nice contrast to other entries.
The first thing that popped into my head when considering "Nine" as a challenge as it relates to people was someone's ninth birthday. I love the innocence of youth and I thought it would be a great foundation for my shot this week. If nothing else, at least there would be cake to eat afterward!
I thought that since birthday parties are usually colorful engagements, this would be a great time to try out something I've wanted to do for a long time - a shot where everything in the photo carried the same tone. I don't really care for pink, but it's a great staple color for a princess on her special day, so that's the direction I went. I was running out of time again for this challenge, so I had to handle everything in one day. I hit up my local party store and grabbed as much pink stuff as I could fit into my baskets. Foolishly, I didn't call up any bakeries in advance to request an all-pink cake, so I ran around to about 8 different grocery stores until I finally found one that had exactly what I needed. The only color adjusting I did in this shot was to the number "9" on the cake; I couldn't find one in pink. Absolutely all of the rest of the color in this image was photographed exactly as you see it.
I've been having issues with color profiles and getting my images to show up looking how I want them to across multiple devices (I've been struggling with this since basically forever, actually), so depending on the screen this shot may look too saturated for some people. I'm aware of that, and hopefully it doesn't hurt my score too much. I also gelled the girl's backlight pink to help even out the tone and make sure everything was basically bathed in it, and while I do think it did help in some areas (the background, especially), I don't really care for the way it looks on her hair or the fact that it caused her feather boa to go nuclear. The pink edges around the top of her head aren't a poor recoloring job; it's just the backlight that was a bit too vibrant.
Light setup was simply a softbox from the top right of the picture and a bare strobe for backlight behind the girl on the left. Those candles burned FAST, and although I wanted to use a shot where the "9" was as fresh as possible, this was by far the best capture of the girl's expression and thus the one I picked. I felt like last week I err'd on the side of the lighting for the "musicians" challenge and the performers' expressions weren't as good, and perhaps that hurt me a bit. Hard to get everything perfect without doing a composite, but I'm doing my best. :)
I love this shot and the genuine joy she's expressing… it's something everyone should get to feel at their own birthday party. It will probably be too pink for some, and that's cool. This was a fun one to set up, and yes, the cake tasted awesome!
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