January 3, 2012 – A year of portraits – Marshae Hopson

Today I met Marshae Hopson at the Madisonville-North Hopkins High School basketball game where she was waiting to watch a family member play. She called me over during halftime of the girls game to ask questions about the Nikon 5000 camera, which she’s considering buying. She loves taking pictures, but not necessarily having her’s taken, kinda like me. However she was gracious enough to allow me to shoot her portrait tonight for my project.

Camera of choice was my Nikon D700, which is my primary camera. Lens was a 50mm f/1.4 at 1/400th at f/2.8 with an ISO of 4, 000. I do love the D700 for shooting in low light, as I really don’t like using flash unless I absolutely have to. This image, as with everything I shoot with this camera, was shot on the RAW setting. I like using RAW as it gives me the most digital information that I can get from the camera, plus there’s a lot of processing I can do in the RAW file that gives me the best results in my opinion.

After bringing the photo into Photoshop CS5, I did some burning in around her to draw more attention to her great face and laugh. As a final step I used the Topaz Adjust filter “Photo Pop” to add a bit more sharpness to the photo.

This portrait just makes me smile!