Your Best Portraits

While driving around, I had happened upon an old barn with very tall grass and thought it would make a good setting for a portrait, so I called my friend Teresa and asked her to join me. In some past portraits that I had taken, I found that by placing the model in a dark opening of a building worked well to frame them as was the case here. Getting a proper exposure for Teresa's face was a challenge what with the brightness of the grass against the darkness of the barn, so I spot-metered off a lighter segment of the wall, the tone of toasted bread, and started shooting. The film was Fujichrome Velvia 50 ISO slide film so I was using a tripod. The exposure worked making the outing a success. As it turns out, the very next day the grass had been mowed making the setting a whole lot less desirable to work with. In post, I deleted her right arm in Adobe Photoshop that she had extended up against the doorway and also added a little blur to soften things up.