Steampunk - lady on stilts

[Jim A]

Taken very recently at a Steampunk event

[Shadowman]

Nice shot.

[rpcrowe]

I hope to photograph a steampunk event sometime on the future...

[Manfred M]

I love the costume and setting!

A few thoughts (mostly technical) on the shot:

1. Looks a touch underexposed;

2. Looks a bit flat. Moving the white point and doing a mid-tone contrast adjustment would help here.

3. Look at the crop on the bottom of the image. It looks accidental rather than deliberate. A slightly more aggressive crop would strengthen that part of the image.

4. Tilt on the image. Again, it looks accidental rather than a deliberate Dutch tile. Either straighten out the image or go more aggressive with the tilt.

[Jim A]

Great points Manfred, thanks! The histogram was as near perfect as I have seen. I agree it looks a bit flat and I have therefore overdone trying to mute the background - duh! Will experiment with crop and angles.

[Manfred M]

Great points Manfred, thanks! The histogram was as near perfect as I have seen. I agree it looks a bit flat and I have therefore overdone trying to mute the background - duh! Will experiment with crop and angles.

Jim - one of the first things I generally do in post (after some of the preliminary stuff like white balance) is to set my black point and white point to give me maximum tonal range, which as a by-product also maximizes global contrast, so I get a histogram that just "kisses" the black and the white side.

I won't do that in a low contrast scene (shooting in a foggy or misty scene, for instance).

The treatment that is usually employed to tone down distracting backgrounds is to burn them down.