Playground Queen

A few weeks ago I realized that the year was almost halfway over and I had barely taken any photographs of my kiddos doing what they do best....being kids~


I've been concentrating so much lately on becoming a more skilled, knowledgeable photographer that I lost sight for a moment of why I crave photography...it allows me to capture the moments of the people I love best.  


So one evening when we had some time in between soccer games I let Wild Child & Princess play on the playground at the park.  Amazingly enough, they didn't cover their faces in disgust when I pulled out the camera and actually gave me some great expressions while they were having fun.


I thought I'd share an edit from one of my favorites of Princess...


I opened my original in Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac:

The picture is great as-is but I decided to add just a little oomph to it~  I like oomph~

I started by softening the skin just a little with Coffeeshop Baby Powder Room and I also added a slight glow to the skin with the Skin Glow layer and darkened the eyes just a bit...

Next I added a texture from the new Patti Brown Supernatural Textures....I really wanted to play up the orange color...I erased it from most of her skin though and just left it on the tunnel.

Then I wanted to blur out more of the pic and concentrate on her face so I added a Gaussian Blur over the entire pic after duplicating the layer...

Then I erased the blur off mostly her facial area using the Coffeeshop layer mask...

{just a little side note....if I had a better lens, maybe a f2.8 or f1.4 I wouldn't have to fake the blur...but those are still on my wish list!  thank goodness I know how to fake it!}

The next steps are where I started going crazy...I tried action after action after action and just couldn't finish it off the way I wanted.  I think I finally used a combination of Coffeeshop Butterscotch Vintage, Pioneer Woman Boost and Erin's Defog...possibly a few more but I stopped keeping track after several attempts!  Here's what I ended up with...I also cropped in just a bit...

~ I like it ~

Here's a few more from our playground date...I haven't touched these...they're sooc...and I don't think I will edit these.  I think I'll just leave them as-is and cherish the moment~

Princess ~ Age 5 ~ Playground Queen