Creating a photo after you take the shot

I enjoy the post processing aspects of photography at least as much as taking the shots themselves.  For me, the creative process only starts in the camera, but becomes complete in post.  It's like a quote from Ansel Adams: "The negative is like the composer's score, and the print is the performance." 

In my photography world, the image in the camera is only the beginning of the process.  Here is an illustration.

This is a sort of street photo I took.

Clearly there are a lot of issues with this original shot.  First, it's very angled.  Second, the subject is in the center of the frame, with leading lines heading up to her neck sort of.  But that's ok, because I was just considering it to be the canvas that requires some additional work to make it into a photograph.

Step 1:  Straighten.

You don't always need to straighten a photo, but in this case it was necessary.  The process of getting the subject into a more or less vertical orientation also cleans up some of the extraneous stuff in the frame, such as the half-person on the right foreground.  So, here is the result of straightening.

I chose to crop vertically in portrait mode, because in my mind I see it as more pleasing.  I could have cropped horizontally and retained more of the background, but I think the background is distracting, so I got rid of it by cropping vertically.

You can see that everything in the background of this view is still tilted EXCEPT the subject.  Many times by cropping in like this, even if the background elements are angled, you won't notice.  Other times, you notice but you don't care.  This is almost one of those "don't care" situations. 

Almost, but not quite.  For me, my eye is still drawn to the paving stones and the people in the background, which takes away from the portrait of the girl.  So, I decided to crop some more.

Step 2: Crop in tight

Now we're talkin'.  Because I had the lens opened up we have a very shallow depth of field and you can see that the subject is much sharper than the background, making her stand out.  Plus, you can see a little rim light effect on the profile, which helps even more.  Furthermore, you can now see some stray hairs, etc., which add to the realism of the portrait.  And, now the jewelry is obvious. Finally, you see the expression in her eyes. Those touches create the photo, in my opinion.  The people in the background are still standing at an angle, but now they are so insignificant that you don't notice.  Your eye is drawn first to her eyes, and then to her jewelry.  And from a storytelling standpoint, you are wondering what she is looking at with her one eyebrow raised.

You will notice that she is not centered in the frame.  That is intentional.  I don't much care for symmetry in a photo unless I am intentionally shooting something symmetric.  In this case, she is staring into the distance, out of the frame to the right.  So I gave her a little space in the frame to emphasize that point.

I could have stopped at this point and been satisfied, and I kinda am.  But I always like to see what happens if I remove the color from a portrait.  Sometimes you get a wonderful surprise.  So I converted to black and white.

Some people don't appreciate black and white images as much as I do, and that's ok.  But I do like this image in black and white.  By removing all the color, I have also removed the remaining background distraction in the image, which was the red jackets and shirttails of the people back there.  In the B&W version, you actually have to look closely to even see the people.  They've almost completely been pushed into just abstract patterns, leaving us to focus on the expression of the girl.

And I think that's an improvement.

So, what have we done here?  We took a sort of random drive-by shot of a girl walking and turned it into a nice portrait, with a little mystery thrown in by emphasizing her expression through removing all other distractive elements.  We threw away the environmental context of the shot and picked up some emotion.  In this particular case, I think that's a fair tradeoff.