"Young and Bosnian" is the tittle of this photo.
This child is my nephew Luka born in central Bosnia, now he is twelve years old. Personally I have never seen a kid with such "adult" gaze. It seems that this child knows something that escapes us, something more. Looking at him, I believe, one can guess his roots and probably something about his upbringing and possible family history.
He is the son of two parents who were young but old enough to have fully experienced the period of the war in the Balkans in the 90s. Maybe something of this transpires from the eyes of this child, without him even knowing it.
As far as editing is concerned, I opted for the black and white “high key” to draw more attention to the eyes and the more expressive lines of the face such as the shape of the mouth etc…
The child has some freckles that could be interesting to bring out but even if it is a nice detail it does not say anything important, so I have removed all the superfluous.
The original is less close up and a little more off-centre, which is why I cropped the photo so that so that no one could "escaped" from these eyes.
I used a Canon 80D with 50 mm and aperture 1.4, shutter speed 1/1250, and ISO 400.
I understand that the settings are more suitable for Superbike photography than portrait photography but I struggled to focus at 1.4 and I tried to compensate with speed, much less would probably have been enough.
Date and the year 19.08.2018