Photos from NILMDTS

We're extremely thankful for the photos we have from the Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep (NILMDTS) photographer.  A few weeks after receiving them I felt compelled to reach out to the photographer who did this for us and ask her for the raw files.  (Original files from the camera, unedited)  She was very kind and gave me everything she had on a disk in raw format.  I do all my own editing in photoshop using raw images and wanted the opportunity to edit some.  It was nice that there were some additional images that we hadn't seen before.  I'm slowly editing them in between other things and will post several of them to the blog.

The down side is we don't have any real "portraits" of Sofia or of us with her.  None where we're smiling happily at our new baby.  There are mostly snapshots of us in the hospital with family in the room (not photos we plan on framing, but still value them just as much).

The only face shot of Sofia that most resembles a portrait was given to us originally in black & white (photo displayed at her funeral).  Now that I have the raw images I have a color version.  Black & white hides a lot of imperfections so touching up the color version was tough, but I worked on that today. (I should mention I did not color her lips; in fact, I lightened them just a little. Because she was not alive at birth, the pigmentation in her lips was very dark-almost a red wine color. Since this is how we remember her I didn't want it to be too light.)

From Slideshow

From Slideshow

I also cropped & touched up a color photo of me holding Sofia in the hospital.  I love this photo because it emphasizes her gorgeous head of hair.

From Slideshow

I have many more to work on.  Although it's sad, I'm glad I'm able to spend so much time looking at her through photos.