Maud

Maud is the wife of John, my friend of over 45 years who owns the recording studio where I work (and do other stuff that fits under the ‘work’ description but isn’t actually work at all :-).
She’s also an amazing artist. She works with brushes and spatulas and possibly a finger here and there, and she wears cool clothes (doesn’t get much cooler than skull shirts) and sixties jewelry that acytually inspired me to look for my peace sign cuff links which I amazingly FOUND !!
She unfortunately doesn’t smell of turpentine cause she uses mainly acrylic paints but she’s got a sweet smile that makes up for that… and she digs a photo shoot now and again which gave me about 150 fabulous pictures, a couple of which she’ll probably use for some artistic project… most of which will probably get buried on my hard drive and never see the light of day.

Most of the shots were full body to show off what she was wearing. But at one point I asked her to shove her tools within a few inches of my wide angle lens. Because I was shooting in relatively low light with no flash, I couldn’t get much DOF as I needed a wide aperture to keep my shutter speed fast enough to avoid camera shake. So I took one shot with her face in focus and another with her tools in focus…

and combined the two in CS4. Also did a bit of stretching to get the verticals straight in the background, cropped to a square-ish format (I find this adds dynamic to portraits), cloned out some stuff that cluttered and did lots of adjustments to levels, tones and contrast.

Oh, and I also needed to make sure her peace bracelet was part of the mix so I found a shot where it was more prominent and transplanted its DNA to measure …

EOS 5D MkI, EF 16-35L

Here's Maud's website. You'll be amazed.