Enigmatic Woman in Front of Eiffel Tower

This is a composite image built up from two photographs: a digital color photograph of the Eiffel Tower, taken by yours truly, and a digital ID portrait of the model’s face, taken (believe it or not) by one of those coin-operated photo booths in the Paris subway. I cropped the ID photo to eliminate the (white) background, superimposed that on a blown-up copy of the Eiffel Tower photograph, retouched a few things to make it look more coherent, and saturated the colors (especially the face and scarf). I restored the model’s bright-green eye color (it had not come through correctly in the original photo) and saturated it to the point of slight exaggeration. I then posterized this, and ran it through a few impressionistic filters. I overlayed a canvas texture on the whole thing (easy to see in the original, not very visible in this small and compressed version). The result is as you see here.

I call the model enigmatic in this image because I’ve never quite been able to figure out just exactly what her expression conveys. It’s just right, though, because it leaves you wondering. This is the main interest of the image, in my opinion.