This past weekend was so bittersweet for us. Our beautiful, dear friend Elaine is fighting for her life against terminal cancer. She is due to start radiation treatments this week and lose her hair. So she decided to lose it on her own terms and have a shearing party to mark the occasion and raise funds for the Rett Syndrome Research Trust in honour of our little Gracie, whom Elaine has fallen in love with. You can read a letter from Elaine about what she’s doing {here}.
So naturally, I was photographing the event. Check out this photo of Elaine with the others who shaved their heads to support Elaine:
{How I Shot it}
This photo was pretty darn good SOOC. I used my
- 50mm 1.4.
- ISO 100 (it was really sunny behind them clouds!).
- f/2.5 (only because I had just been photographing something else)
- 1/640th sec shutter speed.
- WB cloudy.
- I shot jpeg, not raw (gasp!).
Sometimes, I choose to shoot in jpeg if what I’m photographing is reportage. It wasn’t likely that I was going to be texturising or vintifying any of the shots from this event because I wanted the photos to document the day as it really was. And, in the words of Natalie Norton, “I cannot duplicate the color quality of a well shot jpeg image (exposed properly with manual white balance) in post processing software.” The contrast, the colours…sometimes jpeg just makes me happy.
{How I Edited it}
I really envisioned this photo being B&W and for preset lovers like me, the jpeg thing presents a problem because most presets and actions are optimised for raw files. But alas, I used One Willow’s B&W presets “golden shimmer” and just had to make manual adjustments to the brightness, highlights, shadows, etc. until it was how I wanted it.
