Cropping a snapshot

[hartz]

I am quite impressed by the result of heavily cropping a snapshot I took a few weeks ago. The result first:

And a thumbnail of the original to give the full story...

At the moment we had stopped so she could take have smoke outside the car. She was sitting on the driver side (we have right-hand drive in South Africa) to get out of the wind. So she was really close to me, but being love-struck or something it caught me how pretty she looked despite the dismal cold and wet and all. I started taking a series of photos while talking to her through the window.

At that moment I tried to zoom wide to capture her reflection in the rear-view mirror but in retrospect I just wanted her face.

I cropped, then bumped saturation, lightened and softened with a light guasian blur.

Comments/critique welcome.