Beauty is in the Eye

Beauty is in the Eye, originally uploaded by hermanau.

My very first eye shot. Took me less than 10 tries to get this right. Next time I'll try to get a more interesting subject in the reflection.. :-)

If you're interested in doing a shot like this, here's a brief tutorial to what I've done to get this shot:

1. Make sure you have a reliable light source at your disposal, I used a SB600 flash to bounce this off of the direction where my model was looking, and that definitely made the reflection bright and clear.
   
2. Macro lens or macro extension tube is a must here. A point and shoot camera wouldn't let you get *that* much details and *that* close *that* sharp
3. Manual focus, yes you need it. To nail it perfectly you may have to try it many times because most of the time autofocus will lock on the eye lashes; try the auto focus to manual focus fine tune technique here.
4. Trial and error, rinse and repeat until you get it right.
5. Post-editing is a subjective personal preference here. It really depends on the reflection, color, and it's shot. To me, less is almost always more, and honestly I would probably have prefered a black & white treatment all the way. However, the deep brown color is naturally beautiful like a piece of jewel, and thus I couldn't resist. All I did was masking the b/w layer. That's it!