A classic tourist snapshot - a classic portrait with a landmark in the background. The overcast sky created the perfect softbox for this shot, working with the fifty-year-old vintage lens to bring out a wonderfully clean flatness of light.
Shot in Budapest with the legendary Helios 85 f/1.5, which, if you've been following my work, you'll be well familiar with by now. Stopped down to approximately f/5.6 (not exactly sure, since it's possible to adjust clicklessly) to get just the right amount background blur while leaving enough definition to identify the famous Gothic building of the Budapest parliament.
Editing: cloning out a distracting cypress tree, curves too complex to explain this time (mostly boosting blues in some parts of shadows and lowering them in various other ranges), dodge and burn to emphasise the eyes, wavelet decompose to suppress the largest detail scale everywhere except the eyes and lips and the edges of the coat, and finally resize and sharpen.
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An interesting image the fulfils the challenge brief
You have an unfair advantage Eugene with the ice queen for your model! Another lovely portrait, nicely positioned with her expression and eyes she pulls you in. As you rightly say this is a lovely lens with sufficient background detail to show that she is in an interesting location without the background becoming too distracting. I think I might have been tempted to tilt the camera down a touch to reduce the sky above her head but its not a big deal.
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