The crafting of a portrait.

I've recently created a new blog at LoveEnfield.blogspot.com which showcases some of the great people in the borough who are making Enfield such a great place to live, work and shop in.     I decided to do this as I wanted the opportunity to make some great, considered portraits of these people, to help promote their businesses or events and to make some local connections.

Yesterday I photographed Karen & Gunther, who run a great local coffee shop, MyCoffeeStop at Enfield Chase station.   It's a small unit, and I wanted to maximise the space available to me, so I thought about using my 8mm fish eye lens.

I decided to pop this on my 40d as the crop sensor would mean that I got a slightly less wide field of view, and could focus more on Karen & Gunther than I would had I used my 5dII.   

Here's how I set up:

This gave me the following photo, straight out of camera:

Importing the photograph into Lightroom and allowing it's automatic lens correction feature to complete gave me this:

Which is OK, but leaves Karen and Gunther a little small in the middle of the frame.  I therefore chose to manually "correct"  the photograph, which gave me this, still distorted but more natural look:

My next task was to enhance the effect of the steam.  Pushing the clarity & contrast helped a little, but I didn't like what it did to my subjects who'd turned a ghostly shade of pale!

So I took this copy of the photo and layered it on top of the previously unaltered copy of the same photo.    This further enhanced the steam, and gave me further options for refining the image:

The image below shows where my photoshop work was done:

1. The image was naturally vignetted, but because of the crop I needed to darken down this one remaining corner
2. By masking out the blend over Karen & Gunther I could allow the original, natural skin colours to come through.
3. A Waitrose carrier bag behind Gunther was cloned to remove the logo, and darkened down where it had caught the flare from the flash behind him
4. The tiles were cleaned up, the various posters being removed and cloned out.

This gave us our final image (see it large at the top of the post):

I hope you found this useful and/or interesting.  Let me know in the comments below and I'll do it again if there's enough interest.

Dan