January 4, 2012 – A year of portraits – Ricky Kirkwood

Today while out roaming the countryside on a beautiful winters day I came across Ricky Kirkwood on Kentucky 502 directing traffic for a DOT ditching crew outside of Nebo, Ky. I love the look of this picture starting from his direct look into the camera to the lines on the road leading back to the equipment working in the background.

I shot the picture with the Nikon D700, for page two of the paper, and then with my iPhone 4 with the native camera for this portrait of the day. As for the post processing on this picture: I opened up the portrait in SnapSeed and did some fine tuning in the contrast and sharpness areas, before applying the drama filter to it and de-saturating the colors slightly, due to the green hat and coat being so bright. Most of these type settings are purely subjective when working with a picture and I usually just play with the different effects till I get something I like. A lot of times though I have an idea in my mind of what I want the finished picture I’m shooting to look like, other times I don’t.

For the final Polaroid look for the picture I opened the corrected photo in another app called ShakeitPhoto which applied the frame to the photo along with the slight shadow along the inside edges of the photo. So, everything about today’s photo was done on the iPhone, except the posting of it to my blog here.