Sunday afternoon, as we were headed back to the car after finishing up our little photowalk on the Mission Beach boardwalk, Juliette and I saw this group of young women cross the street in front of us. All of them were dressed pretty revealingly, but one in particular stood out. Juliette nudged me to make sure I had noticed; I had, of course. It was hard not to. What struck me as kind of funny or, I don't know, ironic or maybe even a little sad about this woman was how obviously self-conscious she was. She kept fiddling with the bottoms of her shorts, tugging them down as you see here. Her clothes and make-up screamed "Look at me!" but her manner said exactly the opposite. Thinking back on it now, I kind of feel bad for her, that she was so insecure that she felt like she needed a certain kind of attention while also being uncomfortable with the idea of getting it.

Technical info: Shot with a Nikon D40 and Nikkor 18-55mm DX lens, in manual exposure mode. Focal length 55mm, aperture f/5.6, shutter 1/1000 sec, ISO 200. Post-processing in Aperture 3: Cloned out a streetlamp that intersected the woman's head and cropped to 3x4. Applied Daylight WB preset, added a slight s-curve for contrast, bumped vibrancy, and added edge sharpening.

Thoughts for improvement: The only thing I wish is that I had been zoomed out just a bit or that I had taken one step back, so that the woman's arm weren't cut off by the edge of the frame. Otherwise I like it.