In this From Start to Finish episode Craig looks at an impromptu street portrait and discusses the following:

 

- quality of light

 

- separations, mergers and positive and negative space

 

- how the focal plane shutter works

 

- the difference between front and rear flash sync

 

- working with slap zoom and flash to simplify distracting backgrounds

 

- using color theory to both simplify and imply more image depth

 

- using transform skew to square up an architectural subject

 

- using one part of the image to patch or heal another part of the image

 

- using the clone stamp as a healing brush

 

- digital gardening of extraneous high contrast subjects to simplify the image

 

- working with curves and levels to bring the main subject forward