Katie Rose does not go gentle into that good night. She never has. When they almost gave her up for dead at birth she fought her way to life. She seems to regard sleep in the same way, as a little death. She hardly naps. Sometimes it takes hours of holding to get her to sleep at night. When at last she does go to sleep, sometimes she’ll wake sobbing when we put her down. So we hold Katie Rose a lot. Fortunately, she’s wonderful to hold, an affectionate and warm bundle of a baby, shown here in her mother’s embrace.

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This photo was shot in near dark conditions at ISO 2000. For those of you who are not photographers, this means that I set the camera to be twenty times as sensitive to light as I normally set it (ISO 100). The clarity you see in the image would not have been possible at this sensitivity setting with previous generations of cameras. To me it seems miraculous. No doubt, next generations will improve rendering in low light conditions, but it already makes possible a kind of photography that was impossible in the past: candid portraiture in low light conditions.

Like Katie Rose in Chiarascuro, I used layer masking and Noise Ninja to selectively post-process for noise. I also selectively converted noise to simulated film grain using masking and a film grain filter from NIK (although unlike that image I did not partially desaturate the colors).