Is one of these really better than the other?  A recent trip to the Lyndale Park Rose Garden in South Minneapolis gave me perhaps my new favorite photo of my little son, finally feeling well after over a week of illness and delighting in the cool wetness of a fountain.

The black and white is classic, simplified, and allows me to focus on that look of sheer delight on his face, and the way that he always holds his hands when he laughs like that.  But the color version lets me see how brown his hair is, the way his cheeks get rosy when he is busily buzzing around as only toddlers can do.  It lets me see what a little dapper fellow he is in his blue stripes. 

However much I want to get mired in the details of this, and however much my anal retentive nature is satisfied by this, what both styles of post-processing should accomplish is to disappear and to allow anyone viewing this image to get a better sense of the emotion of the moment, and to be drawn into who the person is in the photo.

That is where I get frustrated with photographers at times.  Trends come and go, what is popular now will date an image in 10 years (remember the second inset head in many of our childhood portraits from the 80s?)   I would rather have a portrait that is still technically good, after all- you can't compromise on focus, but a bit less trendy if it meant that it was a more real remembrance of a specific person and a specific place and time. Yes there needs to be allowances in the fact that portraiture is an impression of real life, but I think that the more that I go on, the more I go back to my photojournalist roots and desire to capture reality.  HS Seniors- how often do you really find yourself kneeling on a railroad track in your everyday life anyways?