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Thaw
Thaw
riot


Photograph Information Photographer's Comments
Challenge: Burst of Color V (Standard Editing)
Camera: Canon EOS-1D Mark IV
Lens: Canon EF 50mm f1.2 L
Location: Retro Bar, Manchester
Date: Jan 24, 2017
Aperture: 1.2
ISO: 2000
Shutter: 1/60
Galleries: Emotive, Portraiture
Date Uploaded: Feb 2, 2017

 Another spontaneous portrait of theicequeen with "found" light - the arrangement of coloured lights and blinds by the window of a favourite dive bar of ours arranged itself in just the right way.

Getting focus just right with the 50 1.2 is pretty tricky, but rewarding when you manage it - and the EC-S precision matte focusing screen helps a lot with that. There was just a bit more noise than I'd have liked in the final image - I had to use ISO 2000 to cope hand-held with the low light, and that extra noise (and the DIGIC noise reduction algorithm) caused the loss of a little bit of critical sharpness around the eyes - that's something I'd try to improve upon if I re-shot this.

Editing consisted of curves to bring out the blues and some reds in the shadows, applied selectively in two stages, filling in a bit less of the shadows in the eyes and raising their midtones more. Saturation adjusted for the reds, yellows and magenta, dodging and burning around the eyes and the lips, cloning out a few specks and stray hairs. Then wavelet decompose, bilinear blur on the colour base layer, and partial suppression of larger scale details in in-focus regions of the skin as well as suppression of finer scale details in out of focus areas as a means of noise reduction. Resize, and selective sharpen.

Statistics
Place: 37 out of 56
Avg (all users): 5.1509
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Views since voting: 703
Views during voting: 88
Votes: 53
Comments: 2
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AuthorThread
Sony Alpha a1 II
Sony FE 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 G OSS
 02/10/2017 05:15:49 PM
Hello from the critique club

An interesting image that contributes to the challenge

Aah, the lovely ice queen! Whatever the light she will always make an impact, though I have to say my initial reaction on first seeing this was not so positive. Whilst the lighting certainly makes for a unique image, the image noise and shadows are not doing her any favours, its leaving her looking bruised above and below the eye and on the nose. To counter those negatives your focus with this lovely shallow depth of field is spot on, ‘the eyes have it’, together with the nose and lips. Your cropping is necessarily tight to minimise the effect of the strongly coloured red light in the background but its not a huge issue in an obviously brightly coloured setting.
  Photographer found comment helpful.
 Comments Made During the Challenge
Sony DSLR-A550
Sony DT 18-70mm f/3.5-5.6 Aspherical ED
 02/03/2017 07:33:18 PM
well seen quite different
  Photographer found comment helpful.
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