Taken with the Nikon D40 in Salt Lake City, Utah on January 10, 2009. Manual Exposure Mode, 70mm, 1/640 sec at f/2.8, ISO 200, Nikon Raw Format converted to Adobe DNG format. Edited in Lightroom 2.2.

I took this shot using the same lens and during the same photowalk as urban non-chalance.  What a fun morning!  It was very cold; however, a morning sun illuminated the face of Emma Smith from the east.  The lighting was still somewhat soft but with enough strength to fall nicely on Emma’s face.  I really like to see shadow next to highlight to give a lot of shape to the face.  I was using the Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 so I hit this one with f/2.8 to blur the background as much as possible.  To my knowledge, this statue depicts Emma receiving pennies from Joseph to fund the beginning of the relief society.  A tremendous amount of confidence was placed in Emma and this statue captures her resolute, calm, and confident spirit that she’ll be able to accomplish her assignment with the Lord’s help. 

I converted this image to grayscale and did a few curve adjustments to separate her from the background slightly more (the b&w tones were a little too similar for my tastes without the curve adjustments).  Using the brush adjustment tool I added a very slight amount of negative clarity to soften her face and some positive clarity to her shirt to emphasize the amazing detail on her shirt. 

If you want even more details on this image you can see it on the more properties page for this image on flickr.  I hope you enjoy this photo and hope you enjoy yourself behind the lens!  We’ll see many of you tomorrow at the workshop!