I notice that there is some kind of voting going on for one of my photographs – so if you like it, you can vote here!

This is probably my wife’s least favorite picture. And my sister’s. And my mom’s. Actually, no one in the family likes it. This is used by Gawker (with permission) since I am part of the Gawker Artists deal, where they promote artists when they run out of ads on their network of websites.

Child protective services have made the rounds and several complaints have come into Gawker because of this picture. People assume that I am the sort of artist that beats my daughter then takes pictures of it because I am an arteeest. I always have the original undoctored one on file when our busy-body government comes knocking down the door. This was taken when Isabella was only a few months old, and her skin was very thin. I took it at an extremely high resolution with a flash, so it really caught a lot of the blood and darkness just under the skin. I used Photoshop to bring out the blues and then HDRed some different tones into the texture of the skin. I did not “paint” on top, but merely did a dark vignette around the outside.

Anyway, I think the picture is really cool… and if you are with CPS, please look elsewhere. Maybe you can instead go into a few of our public schools and find some kids that don’t know math and go after the school administrators or the NEA.

And here is another one of Isabella… and this is the sort of picture that the womenfolk seem to like a lot more… !