Genesis of a photograph.

The picture on the left is posted on My Shared Images blog.

I was walking to an early morning appointment when I passed a shop owner sweeping the leaves in front of her shop. I was struck by the colours and patterns of her cloths (especially her scarf), combined with the yellow shutter of the shop behind.

Fortunately I had my camera with me, (I always have it in a pouch attached to my trousers belt). But by the time I took the shot, another woman had wandered into view. It was one of the once in a moment shots - I couldn’t wait for the woman in the background to move, because there were only a few leaves left, and in any case I didn’t want to attract the subjects attention, as I felt that would make her feel self-conscious.


Thank goodness for Photoshop which allowed me to clone out the woman with a blue bag. Tweaked the saturation and contrast.

The biggest challenge was deciding upon cropping the picture. I made several attempts before deciding upon the picture initially posted on the blog, (all the work of removing the woman in the background was wasted as that section of the original photo finished up on the cutting room floor (or Photoshop's equivalent)).




Though I posted the picture on the blog, I wasn’t 100% happy with it. So I asked
Ozlady (Stephanie) to take a look and give her opinion. She did more than comment, she worked on the photo and posted the results.

Her work was inspirational, and encouraged me to “close-crop” (is that the correct term?) the photo posted - the results you see above. Thanks Stephanie.