Street - Red Tie

[Lesley Jones]

If this is any good, then half the comments are for Ron because he spotted the tie before I did

This is a great location, but artificial and natural light cause casts. I rather like them on the old stone and brick, so only fixed them on the man.

 

[Fidel Marcus]

love the back lighting here

 

[Pete Askew]

A good choice I think Lesley, the mixed lighting really makes this. Nicely timed too.

 

[Pete Sykes]

Great capture and fantastic lighting......

 

[Brian Moore]

Lesley or Zooey? (Not sure which to use.) Very nice shot regardless. I'm curious about the camera used and also the post-processing. Can you describe briefly? Thank you.

 

[Chris Dodkin]

Lovely pop from that tie - and lovely PP to draw the eye to the subject even more

 

[Dave Green]

Nice light!

 

[Lesley Jones]

Brian,

You can call me anything you like! Lesley is my real name, but I've been called Zooey on the newsgroups at work for ages.

The camera is nothing out of the ordinary - a four year old Sony A700 with the only lens I own - a 16-105mm kit zoom. I don't do a lot in RAW... just enough to leave detail in both the shadows and highlights. About 10% mid tone contrast, no sharpening and colour noise removal.

In CS5 I generally shape the histogram a tad by lightening the shadows and/or darkening the highlights, but this is minimal, between 1% and 3%. Then I use Nik's Color Efex to work with the light. I don't use many of the filters, just graduated neutral density, lighten/darken and on this one, selective colour correction on the man only. I finished off with selective tonal contrast on the brickwork.

Finally I add adjustment layers for hue/saturation and levels. The latter almost always has the mid tones brought down to put back any mood lost when I lighten the shadows