"Aimee In The Wild"

"Aimee In The Wild"
©David A. Ziser

This is an image I made during a high school senior session a few years ago.  I had actually been doing work for the family for a number of years so I was happy to oblige Aimee when she called.

I always have to smile when I shoot high school seniors – hardly ever do they select a photograph of themselves smiling.  The image shown here was one of Aimee’s favorites. She liked the “wild child” look in the image and the impression this would make to her friends and family.  Aimee is an amazing young lady, by the way.

The image was taken on an over cast day so the lighting was quite flat.  The light was also coming from almost directly overhead so it pocketed her eye sockets too.  Things were not looking great.

I used a simple 50mm F1.4 lens at F2.5 so that the background would go out of focus and bring the viewer’s attention back to Aimee.  What I had in the original image was not that great.  I decided to crop the original image MUCH CLOSER and go just for Aimee’s expression as you see it above.

The close crop necessitated me throwing out too many pixels leaving me with a slightly soft image – now what to do?  I’ll tell you, the easiest solution is to “artzify” the image by converting it to B&W and adding a little “grain”. That’s exactly the solution I used and it worked just fine.

Camera specs: Canon 20D fitted with 50mm F1.4 lens, F 2.5 @ 1/640 second, ISO 800.  Enjoy!  -David

P.S.  You can see the original image by hitting the “Read More…” link below.

What do you think!