January 13, 2012 – A year of portraits – Retha Tarter

Retha Tarter is in charge of Ticket Services and the Volunteer Coordinator for the Glema Mahr Center for the Arts here in Madisonville, Ky. A wonderful lady and it seems like she knows everybody in town. I love her smile and personality.

I had finished covering an assignment for the paper where I photographed one of the artists that has a show opening in the Anne P. Baker gallery there this weekend. I had planned to use a photo I shot of the artist, Melanie Orten Hofmann, but I stopped by the box office to chat with Retha and snapped this photo as we were talking and I liked it best between the two.

The photo was cropped slightly, but not much. I always try to shoot in the camera the way I think I want to final picture to look, but this time I wanted it a little tighter than what I had shot. It’s way better to crop in the camera when you shoot any type of picture as it’ll give you the most pixels and quality to work with.

The picture was edited with Photoshop CS5 and I used the Topaz Adjust Filter “Photo Pop” to sharpen up the picture.

Technical Details:
Camera: Nikon D700
Lens: Sigma 24-70 f/2.8 at 62mm
Exposure: Matrix Metering, 1/100th sec, f/5 with an ISO of 4,000