Fine tuning....

Shot a portrait yesterday for DW. I started playing with some CTO gels to get a warm/cool effect. I was able to transform a sort of run-of-the-mill bamboo bush/tree into something that I think feels like some mystical forest. I set the white balance to tungsten to cool the daylight and taped some CTOs to my little Nikon strobe. Shot on the shady side so I could control the light.



I also ran a little high-pass filtering to give it a slightly Dave Hill look, desaturated the image to get it closer to Fuji NPH and then applied some selective lens blur to make a softer looking background and really put the focus on the subject. Whew. I'm really liking the selective focus look I'm getting now (some convoluted use of creating an alpha channel and a depth mask).

In a time when everyone on Strobist is going for that hard illustrated look of Dave Hill, I'm going to run in the opposite direction. Just how I roll.