Day 230/365: Pastel

This week's prompt word for the project 52 is Pastel. My mission today was to get a photo submitted.   I knew that my submission would be Bear in her new ballet outfit. Bear has been enjoying her Baby Ballet class for almost a year now, but it hasn't really felt necessary to buy the kit until now. As I work near Covent Garden in London I took the opportunity to drop into one of the professional dancers' shops  earlier this week. Oh my goodness, how my heart sang with joy! I have been interested in ballet since I was a teenager although I have never taken even one class. There is something about the mix of beauty and strength that ballet dancers hold that delights me immensely. Watching the young girls try on their ballet shoes in the shop was such a wonderful experience. I could sit there for hours soaking up the beauty and excitement of it all. I am happy to say that I brought a little bit of the experience home with me and Bear was overjoyed to play the real ballerina today. 

I used the Tamron 24-70mm. The slow shutter speed finally caught up with me as Bear was moving very quickly. There is a lot of motion blur in these pictures but in some cases I think that it adds a dreamy element to the image. 

Now I just have to decide which one I want to submit...

In addition to all of this ballet happiness I have been reading some interesting tutorials on skin tone in Lightroom. I don't fully understand it yet. Skin tones are very very tricky! I have just been using the dropper to find a spot where the red, green and blue are equal and then selecting that point. The whites of the eyes are my first place to check. However, I have been reading about how caucasian skin should have a setting where the red and blue are about 10 points apart and the green should sit in the middle. Something like Red 80; Green 75; Blue 70 would do it. The hard part is adjusting them so that they fall that way. From what I have read so far this is achieved by using a mix of temp, tint and .... orange saturation! 

Using this method I went from this... 

.. to this. 

And this...

.. to this. 

This is learning in progress, but I am very excited by this new knowledge.