The enchanted forest #11

No PS tricks here, only a traditionnal slide montage technique. What

about this one? This warrior may not look too agressive, but the red

earth (pines needles, actually) is reminiscent of spilled blood.

This looks like it could be someone recreating a scene from one of the lord of rings films, unless that man's wearing tie?

This is a very effective series and I like it. My experience with this technique (none of which is personal mind you, I have only viewed the work of friends who have done it) is that it is better suited to nature scenes and landscapes than it is to pictures of people. Note the shadows on either side of the subject's face in this photo. When they are thrown out of focus they spread the darkness over the whole lower half of the face which I find a bit distracting. However, given that you are photographing renaissance fair-goers in costume it succeeds in giving the series a mythical quality that works well. I will pass along a tip that I picked up from a friend who uses this technique; she noticed that the registration between the in-focus and out-of-focus frames was not as good as she would have liked. The same problem can be seen in this image. The staff in the subject's right hand is offset to the left in the out-of-focus frame whereas the tree about 1/4 of the way in from the right side appears to be shifted slightly to the right. My theory as to why this happens (and this can be either corroborated or corrected by those who know more about lens construction than I do) is that a fixed focal length lens varies slightly in focal length depending on the focus setting. My friend's solution was to use a zoom lens and to zoom out very slightly when making the out-of-focus image.