A retro-styled portrait of my assistant-with-an-attitude, Jessica.

While we were busy with another portrait session on location in  Manhattan, we saw this old car, and decided we just had to use it in a shot.  The pose is all Jessica.  I decided to keep the composition simple, as if it could have been a snapshot taken in the 60′s of someone’s girlfriend and car.  Or car and girlfriend, if you would.

The lighting is just the direct sunlight.  No fill.  I did bring up the detail somewhat in post-processing.  However, Jessica was purposely positioned so that the light fell onto her face, not leaving part of her face in shadow.

The vintage look is then finessed in post-processing …

The first step is with a preset that I use in ACR / Bridge, and would be similar for Lightroom:

Here are the settings I change away from my defaults:

1.  decrease the Saturation –  for that faded look,
2.  decrease the Clarity – this will reduce the local contrast and give a softer look.

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Then I also play with the Split Toning settings to introduce a warmer look,

Here then is the image as developed with that ‘retro’ preset.
This is the first step in getting to the final image:

The final image is then achieved through combining several actions from the Totally Rad action set,
which is run on both the retro output above, and on an image created from my basic default settings.
I also used Nik Color Efex Pro 3 on the final layer, at reduced opacity.
These are then layered at different opacities:

Each layer’s opacity is then adjusted to taste, for the final cropped image:

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