Meet Barack

This was taken a little over a week before the Ohio primary at OSU. I took pictures for an hour and half and didn't get any that I really liked. As he was walking out, just before the exit, I got this shot. I had never been to a political rally before and it was quite the experience. I'm glad I got to see Obama and listen to him speak in person.

Since we were in an old gym you can imagine how terrible the lighting was (Dim and very yellow). I was really struggling with whether I should use 1600 iso or not. Obviously 1/80 sec is way too slow for a 300mm zoom even with image stabilization (IS). On top of the bad lighting, the girl's flash drained most of the contrast and any real color saturation from the capture. Despite all the problems with this photo, I'm glad I decided to try and fix it up.

Canon 350D (RAW)
1/80 sec at f/5.6, ISO 800
300mm (70.0-300.0mm f/4-5.6 IS Canon)

Adjustments made in Lightroom:
- Levels, Brightness/Contrast, Tone Curve, Clarity, Grayscale Color Mix, Slight Vignetting.
- I worked on a new technique with Split Toning in Lightroom. I tinted the highlights yellow to warm up the lighting (take a look at the flash). Then I tinted the shadows a cool blue. It's an interesting subtle effect that I hope shows up on the web.

Adjustments made in Photoshop:
-Initial capture sharpening
-The image had a huge amount of noise from both the high iso and the slight underexposure. Noise Ninja is the best noise reduction program/plug-in ever. I created a custom profile using areas of solid tone in the image and it really did a fantastic job without loosing too much detail.
- I also duplicated the background layer, added it via multiply and reduced the opacity. I do this almost all the time now to some extent or another.
- After reducing the image size I did a little output sharpening and added my border thing.