I've not shot any portraits for a while so I thought I'd give this some special treatment practicsing a few Photoshop tricks I'd not done for a while.
In low light conditions if you shoot with flash in Av mode the camera tries to expose for "ambient" conditions by having a really long shuuter speed with the flash for "fill". You can compensate by nicreasing ISO to get a daster sutter speed but that introduces noise. In certain situations you can shoot in manual mode in which case the flash exposes for the subject completely vs acting as fill. (read a more complete article here)
http://photonotes.org/articles/eos-flash/index2.html
I bumped up the flash exposure compensation to +3EV to get a high key effect. The rest was done in Photoshop...
Converted to mono in using a gradient map with a layer mask to reveal the eyes which were further enhanced with a little saturation. A high pass filter used for sharpening with a vivid light blending mode, again with a layer mask to accentuate the eyes only. A few other features were slightly sharpened by painting away the mask with a lower opacity brush.
The image was reinported to Lightroom then exported to flickr using Jefrey Friedel's excellent plug in. I also used the "mogrify" plug in from Timothy Ames to add the graphical watermark. I really like the functionality of these two features.
Despite the amazing blue eyes I struggled for ages and failed to be able to print this out with the same effect... no matter what print setting I tried I was getting a sepia effect vs B&W and no blue in the eyes ?? I tried multiple different colour management profiles including "printer controls colour" and they all came out the same ?? not sure whats happening there. (didn't try to print any other phots to check though. May reboot and try again.
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