Lawana at J.C. Raulston Arboretum

This portrait of Lawana posing was taken at the JC Raulston Arboretum located in Raleigh, NC. The shot was lit with a single shoot thru umbrella positioned above and to camera right. Located just to the left of the frame, a 2'x3' piece of foamcore was used as a reflector.
 
Postprocessing included raw conversion via ACR, color correction, cropping and desaturating in photoshop CS3. I used a b/w adjustment layer opacity of around 20% to bring down the saturation. I felt the flowers in the background were distracting, so I darkened them using a curves adjustment layer and a mask. You can see the original unedited image here on Flickr.