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Retro Girl

Retro Girl

This was one of the last shots I took during our trip to Balboa Park this weekend. This woman crossed the walkway right in front of us, and the combination of her umbrella, clothes, hair, and makeup turned both my head and Juliette's. I snapped several shots in a hurry as she walked by; I like this one the best because of the moment of recognition evident on her face.

Technical info: Shot with a Nikon D40 and Nikkor 55-200mm VR DX lens, in aperture priority exposure mode. Focal length 200mm, aperture f/5.6, shutter 1/160 sec, ISO 200. Here again I did a fair amount of post-processing in Aperture 3. The original had a much brighter background and darker subject, so I bumped the exposure and recovery (each +1). I then reduced the overall brightness (-0.5). Then I added a strong bump to midtones using a curves adjustment and brushed that in over the woman and umbrella. To help isolate her from the background, I pulled back the saturation (0.8) and vibrancy (-.2) and applied that to the background and the man in the foreground. Then I burned the background and the man and dodged over the woman and umbrella. I wanted the background even darker, so I used the vignette tool (intensity 0.7, radius 0.92) and brushed it into just the top and right side. Finally, I used the Intensify Contrast brush on the umbrella to bring out the tones a bit more.

Thoughts for improvement: I still need to work on getting the exposure right the first time so I don't need to do as much work afterwards. I think I may have actually overdone the post-processing here--it looks a little too played-with.