Life is messy.  As the mom of an 8-week-old and a three-and-a-half-year old, by this I can swear.  So if I care about documenting the little moments that really matter, I have to recognize that I can't always pick the perfect setting to make the memories in.

This week, we had a sweet moment on the office floor between sisters.  Stella was lying on her play mat and Sydney just COULD NOT keep her hands off of her.  Since we've spent our fair share of time in the hospital and doctors office with a sick wee one, usually I panic. But when I turned around to find Sydney lying inside the playgym with her sister, my heart melted.  After all, this was the very same playgym Sydney was kicking around on just three years ago.  (Someone get the tissues!)

But photographically speaking, there's a WHOLE lot going on visually inside that little mat of wonder. Wild animals, wild colors and the general awkwardness of both children being under something made it difficult to capture the intimate details of their sweet interaction.  This is one instance where a black and white conversion is particuarly useful!  If we can take away all of the color distraction, we can focus our eye on the real action!

Here's my first image straight out of the camera.  You can see it's sweet, but there's a whole lot of busy going on!  I want their hands to stand alone!

I could just crop them tighter, but I feel the arc of the playgym tells the story of where they are, so we're going to have to leave it as is.

Next I'm going to convert to black and white (I do this in Apples aperture, but any black and white conversion of your choice will work).  Normally I would adjust my exposure and contrast setting first, but I like to see the image in black and white before I start playing with those settings.

Okay, now that it's in black and white, I can see what needs adjusting.  This image is very grey to me as is - it needs more definition between black and white, otherwise known as higher contrast.  I'm going to address this two ways.

First, I'm going to adjust my black point. You can either do this in Aperture or Lightroom - or by adjusting the leftmost slider of the levels adjustment in photoshop.

See how much richer the darker tones are?  But I still want a little more definition, so now I'm going to adjust the contrast.

That feels better to me.  Finally, I want the attention on the center of the photo, so I'm going to add a vignette, darkening the edges so that your eye is naturally drawn to the bright hands in the middle.

And voila - the moment captured now focuses on what I was "seeing" when I took the photo!

So now I have this amazing memory of their precious time together...  when it's good ya'll, it's really good!!!

For more in-depth black and white tips - learn from the master... Marc Javier!  Check out his Lightroom tutorial.

When it comes to black and whites, how do you go from murky to stunning? In this Adobe Lightroom tutorial, photographer Marc Javier shares with us his approach to getting stunning black and white conversions with true visual appeal!