Ballerina

Danica's dance academy always has an open session for parents during the Christmas season, so I am going to post a bunch of pictures, starting with the one above.

Don't be afraid to crop because the best photo, or at least the photo that you really want, is often inside the photo that you took. We're not pros, so we can't usually get to the right spot with the perfect lens and equipment, so it's fine to do a little work in post.

At the dance session, it was almost impossible to get photos of Danica alone, so I cropped the first photo out of this one. ↓

Perhaps you can see the problem? Even after cropping, the girl behind her was also in the photo, as were the decals on the wall.

I didn't want either in this particular photo, so I set to work with much cloning and painting to eliminate both her and the decals. I have never before gone to such great lengths to remove an object or person from a photo, and I might not again, but I wanted to see what could be done, and the first photo of the post is the result.

Here's an excellent link to demonstrate the kind of process that I tried to follow in my photo: http://youtu.be/ifhEx4adAa8 . I believe that you can do this with any version of Photoshop because both the clone tool and the brush have been around forever.

Now, for a few more from the session. I love her pose and expression in this ↓ one. It's not the best photo, technically, but none of them from this kind of shoot are — not for me and my camera anyway.

For most of the time, I was reduced to shooting her back, but I liked catching her at the high point of her jump. I stylized this one quite a bit — just for fun.

Because her back was often to the camera, I decided to take a few pictures looking into the mirror. This ↓ is one of them.

And here are a few more without further comment.