What was I thinking?!

A couple of weeks ago I was outside with my camera just putzing around, and coming down the street were these two girls.  I wanted the shot, but felt awkward pointing the camera at them since I didn't know them.  So, I held the camera down near my gut and fired off several shots hoping my aim was close.  (by the way, THIS is why I want Nikon to add an articulating LCD to their D7000 successor !!!!)  Anyway, when I got back to the Lighroom, the images were a disaster--what was I thinking?!  In fact, I was only thinking about the idea of the image and not how to technically capture it.

You can see from the original that everything is wrong.  Instead of panning with them, my camera is steady so the background is sharp.  And instead of using a wide open aperature to help blur the background, I'm at f/8.0...great.  I was about to toss the image when I decided that I would try to salvage the idea by taking it in to Photoshop Elements and use the camera blur filter on the background.  I did that, and also de-saturated the background, but that still wasn’t enough to warrant keeping the image.  The idea I had just wasn't translating into the image.

So I tried one more thing.  I took the image to Silver Efex Pro 2 to get rid of all the color and strip the image down to just the ideas of motion, fun, and innocence.  I used several control points to emphasis parts of the main subject and other control points to minimize the visual weight of the background.  Taking the image back into Lightroom,  I normally like to add a darkening vignette to my images, but in this case I added a whitening vignette instead in order to add to that dreaminess idea. 

Now I think I have an image worth sharing…  Wouldn't it have been nice if I was THINKING when I made the original capture--would have saved lots of post processing time!!