As anyone could tell from looking at my library of photos, my daughter is one of my favorite subjects. In fact, I shoot her so much that she's taken to annoyance. I've also run out of ideas lately. Casual portraits are a dime a dozen at this point. Unless I'm documenting something we've been doing, I've been trying to think of ways to get more original.

One evening, I was putting her to bed, when I noticed that she was wearing purple jammies. Now this normally would not be such a big deal - but I suddenly realized that they coordinated with a long purple veil she has hanging from the ceiling over her bed. Now there's and idea! I asked her to indulge me for a few frames (okay, thirty or so), and we shot this:

Not bad for a guy who's been stuck in a rut huh? I shot the image on my Canon 450D (the professional name for the Rebel XSi) with my nifty fifty mark one. The RAW file was imported into Lightroom 2, adjusted, and then exported into Photoshop CS3 where I went to town with the Gaussian blur, sponge tool, and dodging and burning. Hey, sometimes experimentation pays off!