The little speckles of sunlight coming through the hat brim is what drew me to take this photo. The initial photo shows much more of the face, but not many sun
speckles. The photo is more about speckles than it is about a human face, so I cropped the photo to make more of the sun speckles. The 17-40mm lens is quite sharp,
even in a closeup photo. Every single pore of skin was visible - not the effect I wanted. I made a duplicate layer of the photo in Photoshop, and applied a gaussian blur to the upper layer to soften everything.
This gave me a soft layer on top and a sharp layer underneath. I then erased the soft layer over the eye, eyebrow, hat, and sun speckles in the "sharp" layer. This
gave me soft skin but kept the eye, eyebrow, sun speckles and part of the hat brim sharp. Depth of field was limited at f/8 when this close to the subject (my lens was under the hat brim) so parts of the hat
brim and the rest of the photo are out of focus. A
larger version of this photo
July 19, 2004 |
