WOOT!! Awesome, THANK YOU all for the great votes and comments; this made my week!
I shot this photo in between the Salt Lake City LDS Temple and the reflection pool which is behind it. The woman in the photo is my wife’s cousin who is getting married in May and asked me to do some bridals for her because the photographer she hired to shoot her wedding and bridals wasn’t able to make it up from Las Vegas to do the sitting in time. I was honored she asked me to take on such an important task to document this huge step in her life.
The title is a bit lame and I’m sorry for that but by the time I sat down to edit something for the challenge I was way short on time (like 15 minutes before roll over) so I had to make it quick and an inspiring title was the last thing on the list.
Not much in the way of “Advanced” editing as I mentioned before I didn’t really have a lot of time to go nuts on the shot but I really feel that if I had, the shot wouldn’t be as nice.
Thank you for all the great comments and votes during the challenge; I appreciate everyone’s feedback.
Editing steps are as follows.
Ingested into Lightroom 1.4 and performed the following steps:
Cropped
Exposure: +0.38
Highlight Recovery +6
Fill Light: +2
Black Clipping +2
Contrast +9
White Balance: Custom
Straightened image using Crop Angle
Cropped down a bit more
Vibrance:+5
Saturation: +2
From here I imported the shot into Photoshop CS3 and continued with the following editing steps.
Created a background copy and performed curves adjustment to the layer using liner contrast then changed the blending mode to lighten and lowered the opacity to 30%.
Hue/Saturation:
Master Hue: 0 Saturation: 20 Lightness: 0
Yellows: Hue: 0 Saturation: -31 Lightness: 0
Blues: Hue: 0 Saturation: 23 Lightness: 0
Magentas: Hue: 0 Saturation: 12 Lightness: 0
I then applied a Black and White adjustment layer with the preset set to Green Filter and left it at the defaults.
Brightness / Contrast: 10/20
Dodge and burn
Applied a black and white gradient map and adjusted it until it looked good then lowered the opacity to 40% to dial it in just right.
Dodge and burn some more.
Border
Resize
Smart sharpen: Amount: 120% Radius: 0.5 Remove: Gaussian Blur
Save for web
Uploaded
Statistics
Place: 1 out of 207 Avg (all users): 7.3086 Avg (commenters): 8.5000 Avg (participants): 7.0714 Avg (non-participants): 7.4667 Views since voting: 8790 Views during voting: 357 Votes: 175 Comments: 52 Favorites: 26 (view)
Wonderful photograph, made all the more meaningful to me because I was there, at this pool, in Temple Square, over Easter. I longed to have my wide angle lens with me, but just had the 50mm. Your ideas and creativity, though, have made a stunning picture.......mood, tone, composition, etc. well done.
Wow! I think you put this wedding dress at its very best! Its shape is so much enhanced by the reflection and the round shapes of the architecture. It's one of those pictures where I vote 10 and feel that it deserves more :)
Remarks: While the symmetry is quite successful here, without any asymmetrical ordering by weight (progression from dark to light, bottom to top), this quiet shot would, IMO, hardly rouse an interest. The resulting overall balance and the tension between the two diverging measures, however, make a compelling case for exploring the whole image, despite its singular, centred focal point. The quality of detail in the reflection, especially in the distorted parts, is a lovely asset.
The title, although unspectacular, labels the photo aptly.
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