Fun with cliched effects...

Recent work trip to Devon, visting about 12 pubs a day over four days to talk to the licensees and photograph the pubs. Not as much fun as Toby might imagine, and much more fun than Kevin might imagine. Driving down tiny, twisty country lanes and no drinking involved at all (until I got to the hotel each night).

New LX5 firmware comes with a "tilt-shift" effect built in, which I tried a few times - but forgot to switch camera into JPG mode, which mean the filter effect wasn't on the RAW files. Played around in photoshop instead to try to get a similar effect.



This is the original - pretty dull bar shot, very little DOF. Used the quick mask mode, the gradient tool and then the lens blur filter on the selected area to get the effect.



I'm still not sure if I'm a huge fan of this sort of shot - it's certainly being overused everywhere at the moment. Interesting to see how easy it is to do though.

Challenge 1 - Tom's first stab

Similar concept to Kev's - very shallow depth of field, but sadly not quite so interesting a tree! Like Kev, think the DOF is a bit too shallow here, ideally would have liked to get both leaves in focus and with hindsight, probably would have been better to focus on the foremost leaf. However, love the detail the backlighting has shown up on the leaf.

16-85 at 85mm, f5.6, 1/25s, ISO 200. Delapre Park, Northampton.