The final “Cool Photo” Entry!

This image comes from Aleks at Polka Photos in Los Angeles.

I didn’t have a lot of time to capture this image.  I saw the bride coming into the limo and started shooting.  The ISO was set to 160 since I had been shooting outdoors and my settings were 1/100 at 5.0.  Processing was relatively simple.  When I process black & whites I often think in terms of what I would have done in a darkroom.  In Photoshop, however, I always start processing in color and save a color version first.  In Levels RGB channel I pulled in the blacks to give the photo lots of contrast.  I did a little bit of burning of midtones on the left hand side where there was a window and someone’s arm was visible.  I then converted to black & white.  Burned the window down a bit more as well as the glasses in the foreground.  Using Curves added a bit more contrast.  Then finally used the Unsharp Mask tool at radius 1.0 pixels until I like the sharpening (don’t remember the percent but I would guess around 130).  And voila!