Comments? Suggestions for Improvement?

jandrewnelson

Thanks for the help
Jerry Nelson
www.meesoon.smugmug.com

Tim Kamppinen

Well to be perfectly honest it's obvious that all the blur was added in post, and I find it quite distracting. What did the shot look like before the postprocessing?

thoth

I don't know that I agree. I'd certainly like to see the original shot as well but I get the feeling that the post blurring has created at least a little interest where there likely wasn't much. Maybe even blurrier surroundings would give a surreal touch to the dancing lady.

jandrewnelson

Tim Kamppinen wrote:

What did the shot look like before the postprocessing?

Wil Davis

I can understand where your idea for the picture is coming from, but I think the blurring is a bit overdone.

Your picture reminds me of a grabbed shot which I took about thirty years ago when I lived in the UK. I was taking pictures at an outdoor fête, and caught a glimpse of three girls, one of them particularly striking, and so grabbed the following shot. The camera was a Minolta XM with a Rokkor 250mm mirror lens, and the film was Ektachrome (I think). The girls were totally oblivious of the camera, and apart from scanning the slide, there was no post-processing. The picture is as it appeared in the viewfinder, and this was a good ten years before PhotoShop.

- Wil

jandrewnelson

Wow! Awesome picture!!

Wil Davis

Thanks…

You didn't say which f-stop you used, but you might have got the effect you were looking for by opening the lens as wide as possible. The mirror lens I used has an effective speed of about f5.6 (from what I remember), which was just enough to isolate the subject, and then there's always the "donuts" which were quite novel in the mid-1970s, of course everyone talks about "bokeh" now…

- Wil

Cantfeelmyfingers

Quite honestly, I prefer it without any blur added.

jethibod

I think I'm with cantfeelmyfingers on this one - I think I prefer it without any blurring. With her face directed at the camera, and the very unique pose, I think the focus remains on her. What about cropping it a bit to remove a few of the other faces pointing toward the camera?

Flutist

The post processing blur I don't think bothers me as much as the skin tone adjustments that were made. She looks rather red/orange and you can tell it's not natural.

Nikolai

I agree. the PP-ed version looks like a cut-out. Sometimes too much is too much...

Scott_Quier

You can simulate lens OOF with a combination of a new layer (with blur applied) and an appropriate gradient applied to a layer mask. Would be pretty cool, but you've got to do better than this.