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Saturday, November 02, 2013

Two Eleven-Year-Old Girls Of Note




 
Lauren Elizabeth

I took pictures of the children of my Argentine family. Many are the great grand children of my first cousin/godmother Inesita Barber O’Reilly Kuker. There was one in particular that caught my eye for several reasons. Agustina is charming, lovely, intelligent, and has a face that I must look at constantly and to top it all she is almost the same age, 11 as my younger granddaughter Lauren, 11. 



Agustina

Lauren came over today for her post-Halloween portrait (I was commanded by her mother, my daughter Hilary Stewart). She was dressed to look like Princess Leia.



 

My wife has urged me to experiment more with my new Fuji X-E1 digital camera. I have yet to buy Lightroom so I am unable to shoot in raw format and must content myself to shoot jpgs. I also insist on setting my light meter (a handheld Minolta) to 100 ISO which is a speed that Fuji does not recommend. If I were to set it at 200 I would perhaps get a better shadow detail and maybe less of a tendency to wash out the highlights. Shooting raw would protect me from such a problem. In the pictures here I have yet to nail down the problem of Lauren’s very reflective white dress. I used a beauty dish which incremented the problem of contrast. Still I am happy with the results. In my favourite picture where Lauren smiles I note that shooting without the little camera on my tripod I tend to crop the sides where I do not want to. I might have to do what I know I have to do which is to put the camera on my tripod.





The pictures of Sofi I took with natural window lighting using my Fuji and a Nikon FM-2 with Fuji 800 ISO Superia colour negative. Behind her is an icon beautifully painted by her mother Lola.