Girl and stork

This image has been taken using an adapted version of the “hipshot technique” – In this case: with the camera hanging on my neck, holding it loosely with one hand, and releasing the shutter with the thumb without looking through the camera or at the display.

pro is that you can move closely towards your subject without disturbing too much – con is that you can’t check the camerasettings before shooting.
In this case, I had just come out of an indoors exhibit, and my camera was still in these very unpractical settings:
Exposure 1/350 sec, focal length 70mm, ISO 400

result, a rather soft focused pic, slightly over exposed, and with big lighting differences.

Still, I do like the capture of the moment in this pic, and wonder which techniques I could use to try and improve the image. Or is it just too much out of focus and beyond repair? What do you think?

I’ve done already some sharpening and given the pic some more contrast – and adjusted levels and curves a little.
I also tried other techniques, such as post-crop vignettes to make the corners and edges darker and focus more on the center – and adding a softlight filter to lighten up the girls face a little. But after all, I deleted those attempts, since they didn’t seem to lead to what I really wanted…
I’d like to have the girl and bird come out more, and distinguish them more from the background…

Any suggestions?

Thanks so much!

Steppeland

i know some people see it as cheating, but usng a duffusing tool on the back ground a bit to defocus it, and also maybe bring in a bit of contrast on the stork as the the shoulder and neck i really blinding :)

i’m still kinda new to it all so i’m ure some other people will have better ideas :)

Ross and Kharmyne, thank you so much for your suggestions! I definitely will try some of it out.
Ross, thank you so much for taking the time and looking even twice. I understand what you have in mind, and it may have me finally fiddle out how to do masks in photoshop 7.0 – hight time I get a grasp on that :) –
Big thanks to both, and I’ll post here when I upload a better result!

Thank you Roger! Yes, I already tried some cropping before, but felt that a vertical 3/4 crop would result in a too close crop, and give the impressing that the girl and stork ware ‘locked up” within the frame (sorry, can’t explain well what I mean) – It would cut away too much of the empty space at the right, which has some meaning in this shot ( see the description) – So I finally opted for a free format crop (not completely square – but less than 4/5 ) – In this way, I could crop away the highligted left edge, and have a composition with girl and stork a little to the left (2/3-rule) –
The blurred background and the gradient mask were great ideas – so, here is the new result:

Girl and stork

Thank you all for your kind suggestions and help! I appreciate it a lot!

Wow! You’ve done a great job there mate! I think that looks really good!

You say that you’re not sure if it’s better or not.. I may have an idea :D
Have you saved the Photoshop file (PSD?) as well?
If you have (please say you have, lol) then what you could try is playing with the opacity of the gaussian blur layer.. Bringing the opacity down a bit will make the blur less aggressive and alter the ‘artificial’ DoF.. It won’t need much of a change, but that could be it :)

Still think that you’ve done a cracking job though mate! Well done! :)

Yes, I agree! This, to me, looks much better and now the area of focus is on the girl and the stork. You’ve worked hard to make this picture into a piece of art.