Portrait of a Belly Dancer

Vamsi Illindala has added a photo to the pool:

Khalima is a popular Richmond based belly dancer. She performed at the Richmond Vegetarian Festival last Saturday (23 Jun 2012) at Azalea Gardens at Bryan Park. She was all grace when she was performing and even when casually interacting with people after her performance. I think belly dancing, as with other dance forms, is great to watch aesthetically if the vulgarity factor of it is completely removed. I have absolutely no idea about belly dancing, but unfortunately the skin show part of it is more popular than the dance itself. This dancer did well to keep it aesthetic. Her performance was followed by some great music by Rattlemouth Music band.

Believe you me, I cannot dance for my life, but this music by Rattlemouth could have made me dance too! Please do listen to the below three numbers from here.

1) Binta Madiallo
2) Lebanese Hillbilly
3) Maziqawui Silt

Note: I have never done more post-processing than I did to this picture... I went a little overboard. Below is the entire process:
1) made a pseudo-HDR from a single RAW in Photomatix.
2) cropped (8 x 10 AR) and applied 300 v1 preset in Adobe Lightroom 1.0 - then reduced blacks, exposure, brightness, contrast and vibrance. Increased saturation.
3) reduced the hue and saturation for red, orange, yellow, blue and green
4) reduced luminance for green (a lot), yellow, blue, orange and red.
5) added some lens vignetting.

I worked on it for almost 3hrs to get this end result. All my effort was to make the subject stand out and reduce the background distraction. I am not sure if I am successful in doing that, but I went ahead and uploaded it for all the time I spent on it :-). Below is the original.