In regard to Madison's comments, I welcome the criticism (even though this wasn't posted in the "Image Critique" section). When I read the post, I thought Madison was referring to the lighting being flat (almost likethe light you'd get from an on-camera flash).But I wasn't sure. Maybe your interpretation is of the statement is more correct, Jon...My choice of a relatively thin depth of field was motivated by the technical challenge it presents as well as my own creativity. With abundant daylight, it's very difficult to use off-camera flash with wide apertures as you quickly reach your max flash sync speed. The CPL acted like an ND filter blocking some light hitting the sensor, and the use of the 70-200mm lens magnified the ability to blur the foreground and background (even though I used it much closer to 70mm than 200mm). However,using a telephoto lensdoes tend to compress the scene a bit. Maybe that's what Madison means by "flat."


As far as the girl being grey-ish, again, I honestly don't know. I am colorblind. I am quite limited in my color balancing because of it. The flash itself is balanced to daylight (roughly), so there shouldn't be too much of a (colorcast) difference there. However, as I said, I personally didn't like the picture balanced to 5500 Kelvin so I opted for a cooler white balance. I liked it muted rather than vivid. The way it looks to me is quite different than it looks to most people, I'm sure. It wouldn't be the first time I've missed the mark, but I generally get in the ballpark. At least one person on flickr commented on how he wished for more saturation and contrast in the scene..but others disagreed. It might just be a matter of personal taste...or it mightbe that Ireally do need to use a gray card on every shoot! :-)