52 Week Photo Challenge – Week 7: Portrait - Faceless

I am very behind on my 52-week challenge due to Katsucon. I had 13 photo shoots during that weekend plus the random hall shots, which resulted in over 2000 photos to edit. (Note: you can see the finished photos here.)  Since I can only edit on weekends, it took me awhile to clear the que out.   Those photos are now done and posted so I can get back to working on the 52-week challenge.

Week 7 was a faceless portrait, which at first I thought was going to be hard because I was thinking standard portrait.  Then I realized there are different types of portraits, and portrait is more like class of photography with many sub-classes.  Getting this portrait was rather easy since week 7 fell during Katsucon and I had models for portraits.

This photo is of McCoy Cosplay’s interpretation of Oliviar Armstrong from “Full Metal Alchemist – Brotherhood”. The character Oliviar is a strong female character that leads armies. I believe this picture captures that even though it does not show her face.  It is of her looking out into across the water, into the distance, pondering what is ahead.   The original picture was shot between 11:00AM and noon on a very cold and windy day along the National Harbor walkway.  The sky itself was not very blue and had thin clouds.   I was using an 18- 200mm lens set at 24 mm with an aperture of f13, a shutter speed of 1/250s, and a 400 ISO.   As you can, the original image is slightly washed out and the sky has very little detail. 

Original image

To fix this did the basic adjustments of correcting for lens distortion,  adjusting white balance to day light to warm the image up, brought down the exposure and adjusted the highlights, up the clarity, vibrancy, saturation, then finally increased the contrast.  I also sharpened the image and reduced any noise to smooth the image.  I then applied a HDR filter and some vignetting.  Overall, this made the image pop.  The client did select this image and the black and white version, also shown.  Note you can see all the final images from this shoot here.

Final Image

Black & White Final

This was a good challenge for me, because it made me reconsider what makes a portrait.  I now have to catch up on 7 weeks’ worth of challenges.