Nicky with Face Painting, photo by Harold Davis.

Nicky came home from camp at Berkeley Montessori with this cute face painting of a mouse, and I couldn’t resist photographing his tribal markings for posterity.

To make the colors appear more saturated, and to visually separate Nicky’s head from the background of the photo, I intentionally “under exposed” this capture. When I processed the image in Photoshop, I started with a “normal” (dark) rendering, then layered successively lighter versions on top. This allowed me to keep parts of the photo dark (the background and Nicky’s shirt), other parts saturated (the face painting) while controlling which areas got brighter (Nicky’s eyes and hair).

[Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR zoom lens at 95mm (142.5mm in 35mm terms), 1/160 of a seoncd at f/8 and ISO 500, handheld using image stabilization.]