Kirsten, photo by Harold Davis.

Briefly noted: Kirsten has a mischievous twinkle in her lovely eyes. As soon as I saw her I knew I wanted to make a portrait that did her justice. Her eyes, of course, would anchor the portrait, ever so nicely framed by the saucy twist in her hair. Mischievous twinkle or not, I think there’s a veiled curtain of sadness that lurks behind the sense of humour and beauty Kirsten shows the world.

For some of my thoughts about making portraits, and some portraiture techniques, check out my new book Creative Portraits: Digital Photography Tips & Techniques.

Silver and Gold, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This shot of two models in metallic body paint didn’t seem to present any particular post-processing difficulties. But the devil, as they say, is in the details. A close-up view of the shot on my 30 inch wide monitor showed a band-aid under the gold paint on one gold finger. When a photo is as graphically simple as this one, the flaw would have spoiled the show.

Phyllis gave me a hand with the retouching, which used the skin from an undamaged finger rotated, resized, and warped to replace the fiber of the wrapped bandage. I bet you can’t tell which finger was fixed using this virtual plastic surgery!

Edit: Over on Flickr, I had some incorrect guesses about which finger was fake. It took quite a while for Marty to “finger” the index finger on the model’s right hand.

I think it is significant that it took a while for someone to point out the faked finger, after all there are only ten possibilities. It’s almost like a kind of visual Turing test. Apparently, sophisticated viewers of a photo can’t tell which part was digitally created and which part was captured directly by the camera.

The moral: don’t take the reality of anything you see in a photo for granted.

Here’s a close-up of the hand in the photo before the bandaid was retouched out: