Star of India IV (Accidentally shot at ISO 12,800)

--Lannie

Wonderful portrait capture, great details and skin tone, wishing you all of the best.

I find the skin tones to be a little bit on the cool side, actually.  And I'm not sure the "Hold on while I take this call" pose is the most flattering.  I might suggest a warming filter and possibly portrait crop rather than landscape.  A slight amount of fill-flash might also have helped.

Also, the exif data for this indicates it's been uploaded in AdobeRGB rather than sRGB which may be influencing the colors I see viewing through Safari.

I played around a little bit (hope you don't mind) and came up with this interpretation.  I tried isolating your subject a little from the background and reduce the amount of it by changing the crop while adding a warming filter to improve her cool-ish skin tone.

http://i140.photobucket.com/albums/r34/F1Addict/11110410-md_croppedcopy.jpg

That might be more pleasing to you, but it is not precisely the color of her skin.  She has told me rather consistently, however, that I am not getting her skin tones right, but I know very little about accuracy in skin tones because I have not traditionally done portrait photography.

--Lannie

This is a very well composed picture but using a Macro lens for portraits is overkill, unless that's what you wanted. Try vising a proffessional portrait studio, you will be surprised at the creamy looks hanging on the walls.

Thanks, Harry.  I like that lens for hand-held shots because it gets up to four stops of image stabilization.

If I deemed the photos too sharp, I could always apply a bit of Gaussian blur.

I suppose, however, that I am too much the photographic realist to want to emulate the creamy look you describe.  My subjects might disagree.

--Lannie

Yes, of course there is some shadow noise at ISO 12,800. The remarkable thing is that it was not much worse. No noise reduction was applied in post.

--Lannie